I Am Not An Extraordinary Machine

Sometimes I feel like everyone else in the world has this invisible exoskeleton that protects them from the tiny emotional injuries of everyday living, but I am lacking it so it's like I'm walking around with my guts hanging out and everything that should feel like a tiny pinch feels like a fiery arrow which leaves me devastated and in unspeakable pain, unable to carry on or do anything but retreat from the world and hide.

Hiding is what I do best.

It's not like anything even really has to happen. I'll just feel myself out there naked and raw and just feeling people's eyes on me and knowing they have the potential to break me with just a wrong glance. I feel like a lamb among wolves, just waiting to be devoured.

Like everyone can see through me and see how easily they could break me.

Like my need for approval and acceptance is so on display and people can smell my weakness and my own raw hunger for affection and attention and love and it makes them keep their distance, as it is so very pathetic.

And then every everything becomes just another way of hiding.

New things to hide behind.

New people to hide behind.

A computer or a camera to hide behind.

And then this...this fucking journal...to hide behind, but then it becomes the only time I'm really me.

Like if I stopped writing, I would completely forget who I even was.

I lie. I'm not really anti-relationship.

I want a relationship with a future.

I want wedding bells ringing faintly off in the not too far but not too close distance.

I don't want to build something else that's just gonna inevitably self-destruct because of distance or some other factor.

I'm just tired of wasting time on things that aren't gonna work and saying it was a beautiful learning experience.

Tired of hiding behind things I know won't work out, so I don't have to ever face something that might.