I was in the car with my mom a couple months back. She was giving me a ride to work because a week earlier I had wrapped my car around a light pole, a tree and a parked car in one fluid swoop. All three of these objects slammed into the driver’s side door at about 40 miles per hour. Had it not been for the side impact air bags I would without a doubt be dead. I walked away for the accident without even a bruise. I had yet to talk to anyone about how this makes me feel or really tell anyone how bad it actually was. My family doesn’t have these kinds of discussions. This car ride with my mom wouldn’t be any different, but would probably be the closest to it ever happening.  After telling her about things going on at work, she looks at me and says, “Of all my children, I worry the most about you.”   What she meant, but failed miserably at verbalizing was that I don’t have the capacity to connect with people, that all I am is what I do. This wasn’t the eye opening motherly advice that I had been waiting for. It was almost insulting that she thought I wasn’t self-aware enough to realize this. A couple months went by before last night she once again felt that she should point out that I was different and that was why my life is a collection of epic failures.  I want to say it was sad to think that this is what she thought of me, but it wasn’t. If anything it was confirmation of how distant I am from even the people who should know me best. I’m a child who’s yet to adhere to the expectations of what it means to be a part of society. The status quo is something I’m not capable of being. You either get me and get what I’m about or this is not for you. There is no grey area and there is no room for misinterpreting my intentions. I know my strengths and I understand my weaknesses.  I am fully aware and have no plans on improving upon my foundation. What follows I wrote almost a year ago, but felt was appropriate under the assumption that I am oblivious to my being.

I spend a lot of my time bragging and talking highly of myself. I don’t do this knowingly, but I do. It’s compensation, motivation and an overall need to be liked and validated. I have a hard time liking myself and need others to do it for me. I’m proud of myself and my accomplishments, but I don’t like me. I’m at odds with the person I am and I do things to see to it that I’m in a constant state of discomfort. Peace of mind is such a stranger to me that I panic when we cross paths. There’s always a bruise, rug burn, sore joint or cut somewhere to be found on me. Every single day for the last 8 years I have broken or bent a law in one way or another. I’m in a constant state of half awake from rarely sleeping. By the end of the day everything that has passed seems like a different lifetime. I pull from the parts of my life that I excel at to soften the blows of the parts that are beyond my control. I focus on the things I can mould to feel as if I am in control when in reality I am anything but. I’m extremely sensitive and take thing to heart way more than I should. Mix that with my obsessive personality, my overwhelming need to comprehend and my second nature tendency to reverse engineer every thought to its meaning and you can start to grasp why I’m such a mess. Even as a kid, things seemed to affect me much more than it did my brothers and sisters.  Solitude in a family of 11 seems impossible, but I achieved this by being different. This is why I’m detached, practice. I don’t like people getting close enough that they can accurately judge me. I find being a complete asshole to people usually does the trick. A bad first impression allows everything that follows to be positive by comparison. When given the option of hoping for the best or planning for the worst, I know that planning is something I can do. I prefer expressing myself through forums that I need not care about. I would rather be a passing thought than the subject of a conversation. When it comes down to it, there are a lot of things that could be said about the things I’ve done. I try to be a reflection of what I do, not of who I am. I am the byproduct of my failures, not my successes. If something works, great. If it doesn’t, I have to know why and it becomes my obsession until I do. People at work are more often than not impressed with some of the stuff that I pull out of my hat. Occasionally I am told that I have big things coming my way because of this proverbial hat. In a way this makes me sick. My biggest flaw in life is what pushes me to conjure what most see as my greatest strength. They see the end product. They don’t see the hours of time I spend fixate on the details that don’t matter so I won’t have to think about the girlfriend that left. They don’t know that I came up with the idea after getting the shit kicked out of me because I don’t know how to process how I feel about my parents’ separation. They don’t see that my epiphanies come to me when I’m laying on my couch awake at 4 in the morning. They see the end product, not how consumed in my thought I’ve become to satisfy my crippling obsessions. They don’t know that I have a phobia of leaving the house or of being around groups of people when in this state of mind.  They see my ability to organize and streamline a process; yet don’t realize that I’m anything but. I always have 40 projects going on and my desk is always a mess. Hard drives filled with projects and ideas that grew and evolved into others.  Each a can of worms and an opportunity not to be a failure in my own mind.