Feeling out of place

How do you feel lonely in a world filled with 7.5 billion people? Loneliness is a complicated concept. You can be surrounded by your best friends and be the loneliest person in the world, it's not about being alone or not. If anything, having people around you is merely a distraction from your loneliness.

Ask any of my friends and colleagues and they'll probably tell you I'm always happy and positive. I believe in the power of positivity during difficult times. You can move mountains doing so and I believe I prove this point everyday I work. But outside of work I can be the very opposite.

It's currently 5 PM, this is my Friday off. Yesterday evening I said to a good friend of mine that I was planning on working about 4 hours today. Doing some work on that workshop idea I've had, get up-to-speed with my administration and perhaps play around with some fun technology. It took me two hours to get out of bed, another three to convince myself to at least do the shopping today while resisting the urge to just say "fuck today". This may not sound so bad for a lazy day but this is every weekend for me.

The question you may ask yourself and I've asked myself as well is "Why?". I'm healthy, I'm financially stable and I had a childhood with very little to complain about. But that's exactly why this is fucking with my head, I can't rationalize it. Yet, this is how I feel.

The best way to describe it is that I feel out of place. I've never fit in. I'm the triangle block being shoved into the square or the circle hole. It's hard to explain because this feeling is an accumulation of 25 years of life experiences and is not something that can necessarily be explained by a traumatic experience or a psychological disorder.

I hate labels as much as the next person but I just wish that for once in my life I could label myself and feel like I belong somewhere. Visiting the psychologist 2 years ago gave me hope of finding out if there's something to label myself as. Something to explain this feeling and to be able to communicate it with others. But effectively it made it worse. The official diagnosis was a "mild depression" but she assured me that she didn't quite believe that was actually the case, but an official diagnosis was needed to have it covered by health insurance. So that leaves me with.. half a label? This is just one example, I can give a million more.

I don't want you to think this blog post is a cry for help. I'm doing much better than I was a year ago. This is just me sharing my story with you hoping to do some good for others. Feeling depressed is horrible and it can feel very conflicting when you don't feel like you deserve to be depressed. If you experience this then I hope you realise that depression doesn't care about your current situation. It'll find a way to make you feel down so don't feed it by getting angry at yourself for feeling this way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQVXm-imzoA