Why I'll never amount to anything

I feel broken inside, and I don't know why.

It's not just that I'm jobless, or that my social network has collapsed down to me and my pet rabbit, or that we six billion raindrops are quickly drowning the planet. It's this feeling, permanently weighing down on my increasingly steeped shoulders, that the world wants nothing that I have to offer. Whether it's hunting for a job, looking for companionship, writing, or fighting for all those causes that feel so important to me, I just can't resist the feeling that anything I attempt will end in humiliating failure.

Sissy told me that I'm burdened with an overly keen sense of empathy. She says I can't be happy while anyone else is miserable. Maybe. I certainly let the unfairness of the world get to me. But this doesn't feel like empathy. Empathy is supposed to feel connecting, to break down the walls between people. Me, I don't feel connected to anything. If anything, I feel smaller than my own skin.

I've felt like this, on and off, since a few weeks into my internship in San Francisco last year. At first, the novelty of the place was exhilirating. New town, new job, new people. For a time, I was very happy there. Then the downhill slide started. I've never learned to connect with new people, but I felt the lack of friends deeply. My co-workers were very kind, and they probably would have been more social with me, had I only known how to ask. But hell if I knew how.

Professionally, I felt like a fraud. My contributions were usually meager and occasionally disastrous. The CEO freely admitted that he didn't expect developers to really make an impact in their first few months, and that I'd only be a net benefit to the company if I stayed on permanently. He was trying to make me feel better, but it only made me feel like I was stealing from the company with each paycheck.

Even by those depressingly lowered expectations, I felt like a failure. It felt like I was learning too slowly, that the system I was working on was overwhelmingly complicated, that my technical understanding was woefully inadequate. While I understood, at least abstractly, how revenue streams are the life of a startup, I never felt comfortable with the company's focus on the bottom-line. I'd learned a crapload about Rails in the months prior to the internship, and it was genuinely disappointing to find that there was little interest in it. Because I didn't feel that I could justify myself or my work to the rest of the company, weekly status meetings became my own personal hell.

Outside work, things were a bit better. I could take mass transit all over the peninsula, I had access to all sorts of politically inflammatory books, I could go out to the beach and stroll around when I got bored. I even found a few weekly activities to look forward to, and U2 was always blaring on my 'pod. But even when I was at my happiest, when I could feel the deep connections between all living things, I felt like an unwanted intruder.

It got so bad, I felt so trapped and suffocated, that in the end I cut my internship a few weeks short. Ostensibly, it was so I'd be home when my niece was born. But really, I just had to be away from everything. When I went to turn my office key in, I could barely hold myself together, I felt so ashamed to have failed everyone around me.

I went to Burning Man a few weeks later, hoping to reconnect with that feeling I'd felt early on in San Francisco, when everything felt possible. Like everything else in my life, it started out feeling good and simple and wonderful. Then the fear took over. I couldn't talk to people, I couldn't belong. Everything I wanted to share with the world was trapped inside me, turning rotten and festering.

I went home three days early, and spent the rest of the weekend binging on video games.

Since then, some part of me has never recovered. It doesn't dare to hope for love, or meaning, or importance in life. It expects humanity to consume and consume, until there is nothing good or furry or leafy or beautiful on the remaining dry, dusty husk. It sees a world of broken people, exploiting and hurting each other to hold their own fear and rage and impotence at bay just a little longer. It hates me, it sees me as weak and foolish, yet it is aggravated that the world doesn't see the inherent superiority of my solutions.

This incongruous mixture of arrogance and self-loathing has been my life for the last several weeks. I mostly stay in my apartment, unable to achieve the activation energy needed to do much of anything at all. When I go out, every billboard, every new housing development, every Hummer driving by just makes me feel more hopeless.[1]

I know I can't just sit and hope it will be all right. It's my own behaviors bringing this on, and I have to be the one to change. I know things could be better, but I don't feel like I have the strength to make it happen.




Notes:

[1] It's strange that this "tainted by evil" emotion is such a flexible one. As a teenager, it attached to certain, specific entities in the world: stack of Playboy magazines, a six pack of beer, a Planned Parenthood clinic. Now I have no problem with those things, but the same emotion is brought on by a new Wal-Mart Super Center.