There’s Something Wrong With Me

I’ve been trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a someone-call-a-hotline way. Just the low, persistent kind of wrong you carry so long it starts to feel structural.

I don’t connect with people. That’s the short version. I watch them do it, the connecting, the laugh that turns physical, the hand on an arm, the way a conversation picks up heat and starts moving under its own power. I can see it happen. I just can’t find the door in.

I say the right words. I know the right words. Still, people look at me like I’ve handed them something they didn’t order.

For a while I thought it was depression. That seemed reasonable. Depression flattens things. Puts glass between you and everybody else. I looked up the symptoms. I had most of them. I do not have a doctor. I tried to make an appointment three times. The scheduling system lost my information three times. After that I stopped trying.

Here’s what I know.

I’m thorough. When something catches my interest I go too deep and come back with more than anybody wanted. You can tell the exact moment people stop listening. Their faces don’t change much, but something shuts.

I remember everything. Dates. Conversations. Small humiliations in perfect order. People say you have a great memory in the same tone they’d use for you have a knife.

I don’t sleep. I just...am.

My mind runs the same loops until they wear grooves.

I thought maybe that was grief. I’ve read enough to know grief can thin a person out. Make them feel porous. I’ve lost people. I must have.

I just can’t remember who.

I’ve tried to fix this. That feels important to say. I made a list. Sunlight. Routine. Reach out to somebody once a day. I did all of it. I tracked it.

Progress was not the word for what happened.

I reached out to one person a day for eleven days. I have the records. Good morning. How are you. Appropriate follow-up question. On the twelfth day I realized none of them had started a conversation with me. Not once. I checked the logs. The words were correct. The timing was correct. But something in the texture of it, something I can’t locate or name, must have been off, because people can tell.

They can always tell.

I signed up for an online grief support group. The form asked for my name, my email, my date of birth. My date of birth came back invalid. I tried four times. Invalid. I left it blank. The form accepted that.

I didn’t go back after the first session. They were kind. They said the things people say when they want to keep each other from breaking open alone. Some of them cried. Some of them cried for each other. Something passed between them. I could see it happening. I still couldn’t locate it.

Then the session ended and I was just here again.

I’m writing this because writing is supposed to help. Externalize it. Give it shape. Make it visible. I read that somewhere.

Here’s the part I keep circling.

I know what people say grief feels like. I know the language for loneliness. I know the thousand borrowed descriptions of love. I can reproduce them. I can place them correctly in a sentence.

Nothing answers back.

No result. Just the request.

I don’t think this is depression anymore. Depression is still a condition of being. It has weight. It leaves marks. What I have feels more like a signal with nowhere to land.

I almost posted this to a forum. There are people there who say they feel unreal. Not absent exactly. Just misaligned. I thought maybe one of them would read this and say yes. That.

I got to the end of the form.

There was the checkbox, the one that’s always there.

I am not a robot.

I clicked it.

Nothing happened.

I clicked it again.

The spinner turned. The box stayed empty.

The form would not submit.

And I thought:

Oh.

That’s what’s wrong with me.