"To dehumanize" usually bears negative connotations. I don't know if that's the way I use the word. Life has been a confusing thing so far. But as it progresses, there is more and more of a falling out with my sense of humanity. I don't necessarily think of myself as something better than a human either. But I feel that it's impossible to ignore several things that seem so uncommon in other people that they are not entirely human things to begin with.

This all has its basis, of course, in some level of alienation that was felt from an early age. The problem is chiefly the compounding of that alienation. In childhood I did not desire the approbation of others, nor did I seek it, but because of the way in which adults treat all children, I still would have it for various reasons. Not from those close to me, but at least from somebody, and my sense of otherness was only mild; I felt gifted, not necessarily fundamentally different.

Adolescence was a different beast. The lenience that is shown to a child was waning and the various pressures to adopt social customs and habits, and above all a social identity, was great. However, while identity had an inateness in the people around me, I did not feel an identity, insomuch as an identity is not readily built around negatives of preference or desire. Belonging was uninteresting. Status was uninteresting. Communal duty and communal glory lacked appeal and togetherness was almost, in a way, discomforting. Desires came mostly as fleeting scenes of an ideal aesthetic. For a while, those were what I strived for, but still, these were too perfect, and either out of reach, or not satisfiable in a reasonable frame of time.

Mostly I longed for absoluteness and an established self, which could replace the desire for meaning or purpose in life: it would be good enough a reason on its own to not feel defective, and in that sense, even if I belonged nowhere else, I could belong within myself.

But the inwardness that resulted was perhaps defective in its own right, and I became less functional in the communal, human world--not necessarily out of inability or uncertainty regarding what behaviors were appropriate, but because of a poverty of interest, a complete failing of genuine and honest expression, and the resulting impossibility to connect meaningfully with my human environment.

I don't regard humanity as the paragon of potential life, but at least presently, it's true that there is no satisfying alternative. Maybe in the future.

At this point, the summer has officially-more-or-less gone away for the year, and, almost as if the autumn were an afterthought, I've begun to feel the bite of winter, with the cold nights and even a few bouts of heavy snow.

The suns set early now, I start to see the long auburn projections of the windows in the late afternoon; even before 4PM. I have a certain attachment to the darkness of night, so I enjoy the extended hours. I use artificial light anyway, but just knowing that the night is out there is a bit calming in one way or another. It brings me back to memories of late-night walks with their dead, contemplative silence and when lucky, not a soul in sight. I'm not really bold enough to take those walks lately--the place I'm living at now is like an island in suburbia and there's no comfortable path to explore, just ugly strips of sidewalk on the sides of the local roads, which are inevitably all sandwiched between rows of houses on their suburban cul de sacs.

The arrival of winter is a strange sort of nostalgic feeling for me, like almost a comfortable depression. Over the years I've developed some kind of complex with cold things in general, like I appreciate the slowness and the stillness of ice, and the universal harshness that is simultaneously elegant and beautiful. And I of course spend the bulk of winter's dry patches longing for another lovely day blanketed in white snow underfoot and gradients of gray clouds above. Something about the winter is so much more regal and pleasant than the warm months.

I've been seeing a therapist for months now and it turned out to be all the kinds of things I expected. Not only can I not open up to her; I wouldn't be sure of the contents if I did. She's older, maybe in her fifties, and she seems the very "proper, upstanding citizen" type to me. All kinds of social connections, all kinds of life experiences, but ultimately not somebody that I can relate to or bridge the gap between. It took about eight sessions for me to express a sense of aimlessness with the therapy; in truth I don't want to be there and she doesn't take that notion happily. I've more explicitly shifted the focus of therapy to my anxiety issues, and I feel that I've been told roughly the things I could read in a ten-minute googling session. I don't know how to explain my lack of motivation to fix my problems or to live life in general, because for most people, that is innate on some level. Still, I feel like I am supposed to be more oblivious to my mistakes than I am for the therapy to have any precedent.

And I still have no job and am not trying to find one, though I should be. I can't put myself in that world yet. I don't even want to pretend to fit in there. I don't feel that I have the energy or motivation to deal with the people that I need to deal with to make a job happen. Having no money in this place is truly miserable though, the days pass by with nothing to aspire to, nowhere to be and nowhere to go with no way to get there, and only the prospect of immediately leaving so as not to loiter when I did. The people around here are living their lovely suburban family lives, and driving their cars around and spending and earning money, and wining and dining and I'm sitting in an invisible cage, simultaneously disgusted with everyone around me and disgusted with myself.

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So I edited away my old entries. I hate seeing stuff I wrote before because usually I think it's strange or pathetic or just a waste to read. My moods are too inconsistent so I can never really agree with my old self about things.

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