i do not have anything useful or valuable to report back to you after having spent half a year off twitter. the flip side of insulating myself from a million random psychic influences was strengthening the effect of my own mind on myself, which has been uniformly terrible. when i am left to my own devices it turns out i am a stupid, lazy, passive, weak-willed coward. most days i can’t think or breathe clearly. i have been procrastinating on renewing my driver’s license for 6 months because the thought of interacting with a bureacratic process fills me with terror. most things fill me with terror. my food sensitivities have gotten worse to the point that i can no longer eat at any restaurants except sushi restaurants and i only cook a single meal for myself repeatedly, with no variation. i spend my days much like i spent them during grad school, desperately searching for distractions to prevent me from experiencing my own body and mind. i think constantly about every single way i have failed in life, which is all of them. i am about to turn 34 and all i can think about is how much of a failure it makes me, to be 34 and to have nothing, no wife, no child, no career, all things my father had by the time he was 32. earlier in my twittering i was powered by a certain morbid fascination with my own pain, its brightness, its volume. i know i am old now because i no longer find my own pain interesting, it is just pain and it just hurts now. apparently i have been sitting the wrong way my whole life and it is crushing my belly and weakening my ability to breathe, but sitting the correct way makes me too aware of my body and then i am paralyzed by fear and guilt and shame and despair and other things i no longer have the curiosity to find words for. this is a metaphor for all of my other problems. other people seem to have an ability to move on from setbacks that i completely lack. i don’t think i’ve ever gotten over anything in my entire life. i do not understand where strength or hope or courage or just the bare stubbornness required to decide to stop caring and do something else are supposed to come from. hurts and disappointments and heartbreaks stick to me like tar and do not come off and i’m sick of it. the only thing worse than continuing to suffer and stay paralyzed is the idea of reaching out and asking anyone for help. there is a part of me that stubbornly insists that i have no friends and there is no one close enough to me to owe me the kind of help i need. i don’t even know what kind of help i need. i have been incapable of maintaining friendships for years. on some level i have still not relearned how to trust anybody. the thought of asking for help simultaneously fills me with shame about the depth of my problems, dread about the idea of entrusting someone else with them, and the obscure sense that this is just another test i have somehow failed in life. when you play a video game and you mess up a run as badly as i’ve messed up my own life you are supposed to quit and start over. but as far as i can tell you can’t do that irl. so i guess i’m supposed to do something else but i can’t figure out what that is for the life of me. i am so unbelievably tired of talking about myself. one day i’d like to talk about something normal and concrete and real, like turnips, or plumbing. anyway how’ve you guys been