I wonder if we ever reach a breaking point of disillusionment. Where the crushing isolation (or the perceived isolation) finally ends me.

Some days, weeks, or months it seems bearable. Maybe because I’m distracted by events. By people. By the drama of it all. But this perennial emptiness has followed me since I came of age.

Anyone I’ve felt met by–truly met–either has somebody else or has left me entirely. And the only other person who didn’t… was him. It makes me sick to think about. And then I feel doubly sick for the amount of time I’ve spent thinking about it at all.

Constantly, I take a measuring tape to my life:

Is what I’m doing worth all the days that he never got to have? Am I using this time wisely? Am I doing something of value? What would he think? What would he do differently? What should I have done differently?

I’m terrified that I might die before ever meeting someone like him again.

And even if I did.. would they be real? Or would they just be a fantasy… a projection of what I wanted them to represent?

Still, the idea of meeting someone who makes me feel like me, who genuinely cares in the way that I do, with the same capacity to invest, it feels so far out of reach. And I’ve lost most of my inspiration for being human.

I used to feel inspired.

Is this just the inevitability of our 20s? The result of social media and a world constantly reminding us of its interminable atrocities?

These things have been happening since the beginning of time–Genocide. Violence. Indifference. It’s not that the world has suddenly gotten worse. It’s that we now see it at a speed and scale we were never meant to carry.

And even still, by many measures, this is the best time in human history to be a minority. To be non-white. To be a woman. To be queer. To be disabled. To be alive. And yet: we’re fractured.

I am fractured.

I’ve experienced the same audience capture as everyone else. We’ve all jumped on the train of nihilism, because in some ways… it’s true. And yet my disillusionment isn’t just with the world’s atrocities. It’s that the institution I once saw as my antidote to this profoundly sick society has been polluted, now revealed to be devoid of the tenets it’s supposedly built upon.

Academia was my love. It was what I moved toward. The idea of being a teacher.. It still feels like one of the most deeply honorable paths I could have taken. All I want is to talk to people about the intangible. The abstract. Things that reach so far beyond the daily grind of worries and bills and errands.

Maybe it’s a fantasy land I’ve constructed in my head. But I think it’s actually just a craving to engage my mind in a way I rarely get to.

And so… I’m lonely. I am lonely as fuck. And I think I always have been.

From age 9 to 27, I’ve seen flashes of connection. Moments where I thought I’d been met, only to have the rug pulled out from under me again and again.

I’m tired of this. I know hope is all we can hold onto. But right now, hope feels so fucking stupid. It feels pointless. Lame. Like a waste.

Why am I alive if I’m not doing something that feels meaningful? I want to help people who are less fortunate than me. I want to volunteer at the hospice center, but my schedule won’t allow it.

I want to have intellectual discussions. And I try. But I can’t find anyone near me whose curiosity matches mine.

The only one I knew doesn’t live here anymore. A person whose capacity of conversation, curiosity, warmth, fervor, and ability to seek people out is unending. Life felt more alive in her presence. She breathes excitement and inspiration into the air, her sentences bringing light to even the dimmest of eyes. She is an oasis. But now, she’s married, busy, far away. Living a life that doesn’t include me.

So here I am. Still with so much space. So much capacity. So much willingness to prioritize others. Maybe I’ve become more protective and cautious, but it hasn’t lessened. The desire, especially, hasn’t lessened. That’s for fucking sure.

But I don’t want to be cautious. I want to love fully, openly. I want to ask people a thousand questions about the intricacies of their everyday: why they felt a certain way about a scene in a show, what memory they were having when they didn’t even realize they were having one. I just want it to be returned, too.

Even reading books makes me feel lonely now. One of the few things I’ve loved more than almost anything in this life now feels like a hollow echo.

Because when I finish a book that transforms me, fundamentally shifting how I operate as a human being, I have no one to talk to about it.

I have people who will listen. People who care. And I don’t want to diminish the gift of that. But just once, I wish I could meet someone who wanted to read with me. Who wanted to dissect it in-depth. Whose method of madness within their curiosities and interests aligned with mine.

I’m so lonely. And I don’t know what to do about it.

I have amazing friends. Supportive, lovely friends. But this part of me, the one that’s grown into the largest, most important aspect of who I am, I don’t get to engage.

And so, I anesthetize myself. I don’t know if I can live like this forever.