I'm a ghost, nobody ever saw the real me, not even me (a life story)
I am a ghost, an empty shell of something that used to be alive. For as long as I can remember, I've been faking being alive. I can't actually remember a time where I actually felt alive, happy.
There were moment I thought I was happy throughout my life, but looking back I realize that I wasn't not. I was just going through the motions of what was expected for someone who is supposed to be happy. I never allowed myself to feel anything since that day in the 90s. The only time I felt something, truly felt something, it was because the emotions were so overwhelming that I became consumed by them.
When I was a child, I was sexually assaulted by my father. As I'm guessing most child would react when someone who is supposed to protect you does something like this, my mind disassociated with the event. To this day, all I remember is a dream. A dream where things happen that shouldn't happen. A dream that made me feel the most uncomfortable feeling I've ever felt. For a long time, I wondered if that was really a dream or not. It didn't really matter in the end, because the impact on my mind were clear. While my mind didn't understand, my body certainly did.
As a child, I was that kid who could play alone, truly alone, while imagining another world around me. I wasn't just weird, it's just that this imagined world felt more right than the one I was living in. I wouldn't say that I was sad, because it's only later in life that I truly realized what happened. I think my mind built an armor, or a cocoon, to protect itself after what happened, and that prevented me from feeling emotions for most of my life.
Then, growing up, something happened. Computers, my first love. There was no need for me to imagine another reality anymore, it was there in front of me. Finally a place where I can be whatever I want to be and nobody can know better because I'm hiding behind a screen; the Internet. Oh man did I dive into that head first. I didn't need to bother about emotions anymore, I could just type what I wanted people to think about me. The Internet became a safe place for me during the early days of my adolescence.
And then, time passed again. It's during my high school years that I met Lady Maryjane. Finally, I could have friends without needing feelings. I could just get high and do stupid shit with people who just wanted to get high and do stupid shit. To this day, my only friends are the friends I made during that time. I can't say we're really close, me being me and all that, but we're friends. With time, one of them became like a brother to me. He's the only one who never gave up on me, even if he had all the reasons in the world to do so. Most of the others tried to be there for me in some shape or form, but they gave up at some point. I'm not blaming them, it was my fault for not being able to be available for them, but I'm glad that I can still call them my friends to this day.
And then, I met her. We were 14 or 15 years old, I don't remember exactly, but we instantly connected. We were rebels in our heart. There was no authority figure that could control us. I remember meeting her outside of the classrooms because we were both kicked out of them. We fell in love hard, as all first love does. This was the earliest emotion I remember of my teenage years, but it didn't last long. Not because what we had was not real, but because I simply couldn't process what I was feeling. The love I felt for this girl made all my insecurities grow up. I became jealous because of them, despite her trying to reassure me as much as she could at that age. It consumed me and she fell out of love at some point.
To this day, I still remember that pain. That pain, and the intensity of it, shaped the next 25 years of my life. It took me years to "recover" from that heartbreak, if we can call that a recovery. I was not just heartbroken like a normal teenager, I went into a full major depression and I had no support system to properly help me through this. At that time, mental illness was still very taboo and people, even grown ups like my parents preferred to ignore it. I vowed to myself at the time that I would never allow myself to feel anything like that, so I worked intensely on building my armor again. It was never completely broken, but it will be unbreakable this time. Never again will I feel this pain I said to myself every single day and every single night.
And you know what? At some point, I did stop to feel that pain, but I also stopped feeling anything, anything at all. Joy? what is that? Happiness? never heard of it. Loneliness? I've been alone my whole life and I never felt lonely. Become an alcoholic sure did help. Drinking +10 beers every day for the next 15 years worked like a charm. Not only did I now have my armor, but I was high and drunk all day long, and I even adding social isolation to the mix to be sure. I stopped going out with my friends, when I was asked how I was doing, I just lied. Sure, I'm fine, no worry, I'll survive. Little did I know...
Fast forward to 2023, I had a wake up call. "If you continue like this, you're going to get liver cirrhosis" she said. For as long as I can remember, I never wanted to die. No matter how hard life has been for me, dying was never an option I considered. I hope for a long time not to wake up when going to bed, but dying for real? Never. So something had to change, I had to change.
I decided to put my big boy pants and go to therapist to stop drinking. And eventually I did. My alcoholism has now been in my control for almost three years now. That was a step in the right direction, right? At the same time, I decided to address my recurring depression as well. After all, I could not stop drinking and still allow myself to feel depressed all the time. And you know what? I did. It's been a few years since I have felt completely depressed. I'm not 100%, but at least I'm functioning now. I can take care of my house, I don't need to motivate myself to get out of bed, I can empty the litterbox of my cats without feeling like it's the hardest thing in the world.
Fast forward to 2026. I met this girl. Well, I say I met her, but I've known her for a long time. We were never really close friend, but yeah we were kind of friendly toward each other. She's actually the only person who ever organized a surprise birthday party for me, when I was 30 years old. None of my friends ever did that, but she did even when she had no reason to. Just because she has a good heart.
In the last few months, we talked a lot. She was going through some shit, I thought I could help her, I'm not sure I really did, but I was there for her as much as I could. We built an emotional bond that, honestly, I never had with anyone in my whole life. I felt so secure in this bond that I allowed myself to tell her about my sexual assault. She is the only person in the world of knows that about me (well, I guess if you read through this, you do too but you don't know me so it's not the same). Not even my best friend, my brother, my mother knows this about me. Not even my therapist (yet).
I kind of love her for that, but I'm not in love with her. I don't think it's possible for me to love, at least not right now, not yet. There's so much work to be done in me. But I feel like since I opened my deepest secret to her, something changed inside me. The armor I built up, the cocoon I've been hiding inside for so long cracked, and now, I feel like I'm standing in front of an ocean of emotions, and every wave is hitting me harder and harder. I keep crying daily, but I don't feel like I am in depression, and I am not afraid of these emotions anymore. I need to learn to process them properly to become healthy again, avoidance is not an option anymore. I now realize that, my whole life, every symptom I had has it's root in the sexual assault I was victim of. I never realized it before, although I may have suspected it. My anxiety, my depression, my fear of rejection and abandonment, all of these stems from that trauma, and I've had enough.
Now, it's easy to say that.. I've had enough. Good, but what's next? I've never felt as lonely as I feel now. Like I said earlier, I was always alone, but never lonely, but that's not the case anymore. I just want someone to hug me when I get hit by those waves, I crave for a physical touch that I simply don't have, and it's killing me. It's worse than any pain that I felt. I just want someone who will hug me and tell me everything is going to be ok. I feel like I'm a child again.