Disillusionment: I had a ninth grade English teacher who had the word on our vocabulary list, and gave us an example of the meaning. He’d worked in a church as a boy. Idolizing the pastor, he ran errands and did odds-and-ends jobs. One day he happened on the janitor showing the pastor a colorfully embroidered set of handkerchiefs, each depicting Snow White doing “different things” with each of the seven dwarfs. He was disillusioned.

I understood. I may have been the only one in the class who did.

I was already disillusioned and long past being damaged. Damaged beyond repair, as it turns out.

If only life were like movies, comic books and video games, I could have made a comeback. In the end, or at some point, I’d have gotten the love of my life. Made myself a success and had time for deep sea fishing, drinking beer and going to football games. I’d have raised kids who would still be alive.

Then I would retire to the mountains and write novels while snow fell outside and the fireplace had a crackling fire in it.

LEVEL UP!

In a video game, every birthday I would have leveled up. More XP. Stronger, wiser.

I’m close to leveling up for the 61st time. Level 61.

I will not be stronger. I will not be wiser. I’ll still be a loser, one year older, in more pain, still broken.

No repair, no recovery having been made, because life is just that way for losers.

At around level 61 in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the game sent a level 99 mercenary into the Greek Islands. I spent hours eluding him, but one day I had a bounty on my character and the merc who showed up first was the level 99 behemoth. Tired of having unfair shit thrown at me by the game, I took him on. I beat him easily. Again: life is no video game. If it were so, the many level 99s I’ve faced would have done no harm. I could be writing the great American novel right now, well into the night, looking forward to visiting my grandchildren after COVID-19.

Now, I look forward to nothing.

There is nothing that I can feel excited or enthusiastic about. I’m flat. No highs, no days when I can say I’m blessed to be here and really feel it. It is a fact. Nothing more.

What have I become?

This is mental illness at its most basic. I cannot easily socialize because my words are lies. I care and really want an answer when asking a neighbor how they feel. Faced with the same query, I lie: “Oh, I’m fine, thanks.” It’s the act of a liar, and I should feel shame, but instead I feel nothing.

This is how I felt the last time I tried to kill myself: I felt nothing.

The physical pain is there; a constant reminder that I must still be alive. On the inside, I’m dead.

Incapable of love, sympathy, righteousness. Everything good I thought I was, is gone. Was it ever there?

For a while I thought I was going to have a place in someone’s life. That I would be a part of something resembling a family.

That was stupid. A loser can never win. Once alone and unloved, love can never again fill one’s heart, and if it does, something will happen that will end it. When a woman began to be adversarial, I understood. She was going through too much. When I was called a disparaging name, it hurt. I didn’t immediately unplug, I tried the phone. I knew I’d get no answer.

That’s okay. I understood that, too. I guess I deserved it. Being an asshole, I’m sure I did. So I disconnected all those involved. Clearly, I was fucking up their lives. I do that. To everyone.

I will let you down.

I’ll hurt you.

And I just can’t hurt anyone else. I’ve done far too much of that.

I’ll disappoint or hurt you enough to chase you away. Sooner or later I do that to everyone. If I think they’re ambivalent or about to leave my life, I cut the ties first. It hurts less that way. At least that’s what I tell myself.

What have I become?

Because trauma, low self esteem and deep, long-cycle periods of depression have more power to take apart who I am and whatever talents or any good in me than I have to fight back.

To this fucking day people still tell me I have to move forward. It’s more insulting that the worst abuse I ever got from my father or my ex-wife. Don’t tell me to go forward. Don’t you think I wish I could? That it was that fucking easy?

Don’t tell anyone to go forward,  move on or whatever else you think sounds good. It hurts. Because some of us can’t.

On these posts, any reader can see that I’ve been up and down but mainly down.

You know what I want to do? I want to talk about how openly stupid and deviant the Republican party in the United States is. How they throw themselves under a former president’s belly like mewling kittens looking for teats. And I want to discuss in front of the rest of the world how people who voted for him after he constantly lied, committed crimes against humanity, lied about those, bribed and brainwashed and lied more to get reelected are among the most stupid bastards on this planet.

I don’t have it in me to do it and give it justice. The United States is doomed if this trend toward fascism doesn’t stop. With our arsenal, everyone else in the world should be praying that Joe Biden is successful and gets reelected because that would mark eight years of a gradual recovery of sanity.

I can’t tell you that. It should be evident but I’m sorry, we of good conscience must always stand against evil. I want to talk about that.

I can’t.

What have I become?

I’m also unable this time to remain on social media. This time it is not because I can’t take the hate on there.

It is because I’ve hurt people…friends…

With my own words. Always so down that I could tell people were unfollowing me. Always such a downer…a sick man trapped by misfiring synapses and betrayed by his own brain, trapped in the past, chased by ghosts and in constant despair. Who would want me on their friends list in my current condition, I asked myself.

And this time for the good of others I left a post saying I’d shut down my account in a few days.

Some know that I stabbed mutual friends of theirs in the back. They’re no longer communicating. Can you blame them?

Others don’t want me to give up.

I’m grateful to them. More than words can say, I’m so very grateful. But if I stay, I run the risk of emotionally reacting, hurting any one of them. Words can do such great harm. I can’t risk it. I can’t be on social media. I can’t.

Level 61. Wow. Never thought I’d get this far. I know it isn’t fair, because while a loser like me goes on, good people with families have lost their own. Not fair. COVID-19 continues on and idiots refuse the chance to be vaccinated. They think a lower mortality rate means it’s over. They lost family too, and still won’t bother with two simple, free shots that could save themselves and save others from them. People have left us. Gone forever, leaving behind families and friends and jobs and bright futures.

And I sit here wondering why, why am I here, why someone else could be taken while I’m spared Death’s reach.

For all my years on this earth I have seen so much suffering and injustice that I am both thankful and feeling cursed by my sensitivity. Look at what is going on right now, and again I refer to COVID-19. In India, the infection rate is simply apocalyptic. I mean, they’re even out of oxygen.

People in news footage lie helter-skelter on pallets, mostly on the ground, any several of which you see will die or already have died. The strain of the virus doing this has already made it to the US, and the travel ban may be on, but we really need to help the rest of the world if we can.

India needs help now. We’re the ones who can give the help.

As I write this, Rachel Maddow is discussing the Biden administration’s proposal to lift patents for the vaccine to facilitate generic manufacture and distribution in order to provide an already sectioned 16 billion dollars in global aid.

It’s really complex and certainly will be strenuously fought by the corporations involved as well as Republicans. And there’s more involved than the manufacturing process. But helping India, and other countries with no vaccines, is the right thing to do.

When did it become okay for America to turn away from rendering help to other countries? The answer begins with Donald Trump. A man of no conscience, devoid of anything remotely human. A man worshipped by the power mongers of the Beltway and the abominable ones who come in the name of God or Jesus.

When, or if, I cycle out of this extended period of deep depression, I hope I’ll feel how blessed I am. Yesterday I received my second COVID-19 vaccine. The odds that I will survive to level up just got better.

I hope I can feel gratitude for it. I hope that by my level-up day, I’ll have picked up some powerups for extra stamina like in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Or that I’ll stumble upon some treasure. And live long enough to use it to help people.

But…

But…

Life is not a video game.

And I’m an asshole.

And I’ll hurt you.

I’ll bring you down.

I will regret it later…

But then, it won’t matter.

What have I become?