u/Amaal_hud

How do you spend your alone time?
I can’t seem to find anything I want to do, ever. I go to work from 8-4 I come home around 4:30 and till my sleep time (which is around 10) I’m just laying down in bed. Doing nothing. Maybe listening to some music in my phone. That’s about it. Years and years of this.
I have no drive towards anything. Also I’m so picky when it comes to series/movies I rarely find something interesting, plus I really struggle to keep my concentration and be engaged.
I like reading (specially psychology stuff) but I don’t read like a normal person, few pages and I begin to feel restless and shut down.
I don’t go out of the house unless it’s something necessary. Other than that maybe a restaurant once a month. That’s it.

I am really BORED and empty. Everything feels pointless, there is no pull towards anything.

Relationships are the worse. They bore me to death. Every interaction feels fake and made up.

I always hear that schizoid people usually have interests they lose themselves in, like IT, programming, playing an instrument etc. I have no interests at all!!
I am not good at anything.
Even if I do something I can never lose myself in it, I am always self conscious watching myself from the outside, can’t ever let go.
I would love to lose myself. I’m tired.

My whole adult life I have felt this weird sense of distance, of being cut off from everyone and everything, of estrangement, of being fundamentally and utterly different and alone. I used to call it “rejection” , when I am with people I feel that my core being is being rejected, not the classical (i am unwanted) rejection, no, it’s (me being here is wrong) rejection. It’s like existence itself is constantly rejecting and persecuting me. 35 years of this.

Then, a couple of years back I started digging more in this feeling. And because I read a lot of psychoanalysis literature. I came to realize that this way of being has a name. It’s called (alienation).

And by searching, reading dozens of books and articles I came up with a list of symptoms that capture my alienation experience. I thought of sharing it here.
Maybe you will find it relatable, too.

-Feeling like a spectator in my own life:
I watch myself do things but don’t feel like I’m doing them. No solid sense of (I) , my living feels like a performance I am watching from a distance.
-Emotional deadness:
Difficulty accessing feelings. I know, intellectually, that I should feel something, but there’s a flatness. It’s like being cut off from my own aliveness. The bright side: I can’t even feel my (suffering) , I suffer from a distance.
-Compulsive conformity to an external image:
I live through what is called “ego ideal” , what I think others want me to be. My choices track social scripts, not desire.
-Split between thought and feeling: Intellectualization. I can analyze everything about myself but feel nothing. Or I have intense feelings that seem to belong to someone else (there is a felt gap between my sense of self and my experience of life, between my mind self and my body self).
-Others feel unreal or like objects:
People are roles, “my boss” “my mom” etc, not subjects. I can’t quite meet their interiority. They are more of 2D pictures.
-Instrumental relationships:
I relate to people for what they provide: validation, security etc, not for the relationship itself. The moment they are no longer of use to me I discard or ghost them. Guntrip talked about this, how the schizoid person is a bit cruel and lacks sensitivity to other’s feelings. It’s not classical narcissism. It’s more of (people don’t register as relevant, I don’t feel a need to keep them around, it takes massive mental effort to keep a relationship alive).
-Isolation despite contact:
I can be surrounded by people and still feel profoundly alone. Small talk is exhausting because it highlights the gap between my surface and my depth or what they call the real self.
-Paranoia or excessive compliance:
Either everyone feels like a threat/judge, or I merge with them and lose boundaries then panic about it. Both are ways of not meeting the other as a subject.
-Empty speech:
I talk but feel like I am saying nothing real. Talking feels cliche, borrowed or performative. The signifier doesn’t touch my experience (Lacan).
-Meaninglessness / absurdity:
The world doesn’t make sense in a lived way. I can explain ideologies or belief systems, but they feel arbitrary and unreal. A constant “why bother?” mode.
-Being spoken by the “big Other”:
I hear constant internal commentary (society, parents,etc) judging my every move. My inner monologue isn’t mine. And it’s harsh. There is a sense of an inner eye watching me the whole time.
-Body as machine:
I relate to my body like an object I possess, not inhabit from the inside. There is a sense of being localized above the neck, in the eyes segment. The rest of the body feels distant. A constant fatigue and loss of energy.
-A strange relationship with time:
Time doesn’t feel linear, as if everything is happening in a constant “now”. People and events stick, they feel as if they are always here.
-A feeling of being ageless and genderless:
This is a part of being alienated from myself. I don’t feel my own age, I don’t feel a 35 years woman, i feel formless, small. People relate to me as a grown woman but I don’t feel that, it’s like my outer physical character and my inner experience are severed. The inner experience is frozen. As if I haven’t been born yet.
-A constant sense of existential dread:
Feeling cut off as if I live in a sealed bubble nothing reaches me. And I always run from this feeling by not being still for a long time.

Another point is that I feel as if I am living (manually), I am generating the reactions and emotions and movements in real time, specially in relationships. It’s like my inner spontaneity is dead or frozen. I have to animate myself around people and that’s just exhausting.

That’s it. I felt like sharing the pain. Thank you for reading.