I am afraid of pushing people away when I tell them what I care about… but not sharing it makes me feel alone even around people. So sometimes I isolate myself. I don’t always feel lonely when I do but when I feel like I can’t call anyone to talk about what I care about then, like now, I feel alone, like no one cares about what I care about and because no one cares about what I care about, no one cares about me.
I don’t know if anyone reads this and even if they did, I don’t know what I’d hope for.

I have tried to ask people to tell me the topic they want to talk about so that I can decide if it is something that would make me feel good, something we could share and connect through. This hasn’t worked so far.
I have tried to reach out to people but connecting emotionally is difficult. People want reasons. I once thought everyone was like that but while staying at geðspítalinn I met people who really seemed to want to help me feel better regardless of what reasons I could come up with to ask whatever consideration I was asking of them.
Right now I feel like it is okay to be viewed like there is something wrong with me by others, at least they may show me consideration or let me be alone. I hope I get to be alone one day without this lingering feeling of someone out there trying to change me, to be normal, or to act normal again. I want to live as myself, I can’t act normal anymore, I don’t want to be asked to act normal, to act as I used to, to act out a life. To have normal responses to normal questions, normal behavior in normal circumstances.

I am not my disease, my disease was always this pretending, the not sharing of what I was experiencing for fear of being weird, pushing people away.
I remember a time when I was a child where a librarian was reading a story for our class and I for some reason whispered this to her, rather than just say it outloud that I felt her voice was a whisper inside my head and it didn’t feel good.
I remember hearing my fathers voice calling me when there was no one around.
I remember waking up rushing to the mirror and seeing my reflection smile at me and a voice talking to me.
Does it matter if I realize that this isn’t real? It’s real as it happens, it really happened. Retrospectively analyzing this doesn’t change the moment it happens. Will someone be considerate towards me only after hearing this? I don’t want anyone’s pity but I want space where I can feel safe to be myself, a place where I feel good, where there aren’t things that make me feel bad… sometimes the only place I can find that is alone, and at least I can be thankful to everyone who has helped me that I now have an apartment. Now I can go there where I have more control over my environment and it won’t hurt anyone’s feelings.