Swelltide.

This is likely to be a long and rambling post, because I am nearly drunk and because I've been doing a lot of thinking.

I'm in a weird, reflective mood, and I've done a lot of quiet, solemn thinking the last couple of days. About everything. God, who I am not sure that I believe in anymore. Friends, which I don't have many of anymore. Love. Life. The real value of things, and the real meaning of things.

As a teenager, everything seemed so full of purpose. Maybe, it was having the whole of my life ahead of me. Feeling like anything was possible. Feeling like anything could and would happen. A lot of things did happen. I moved away from home only a few months after I turned eighteen. It doesn't really matter that I moved back home only a few months later. I lived more in those few months than I have in the years since.

To be thirty (or almost thirty) and to look back on my teenage years still. It tells me that my life since has been mostly wasted, which is something that I loath to admit, and it tells me that I need to change some things. School has been a good start on that-- starting over, but I need more. I need to know that there is still  joy and meaning to living.

 I think of things like; if I were to die, who would come to my funeral? I don't know the answer and I'm not sure that I really want to. I haven't made any meaningful friendships in years. I haven't met anyone worth being friends with in years. I can't blame it on everyone else anymore. My girlfriend can seem to make friends at school, work-- wherever she goes. Friends and family. They can find people to connect with and mesh with. Why can't I?

I could say now, that I feel isolated BECAUSE of being bipolar. I have a hard time socially BECAUSE of being bipolar. But, I don't accept that, at all. If only there were another person that I knew that was a carbon-copy of myself. I would get along great with myself.

I used to meet people everywhere I went. I would talk to anyone. I would approach anyone. And now, I ask myself things like, 'was it because I was in a manic phase?' It robs me. Bipolar steals every bit of meaning. I have become, fore reasons I don't fully understand, so isolated. Socially awkward. Hesitant. Full of doubt.

And, I hate it.

I can spend all day at school without the need to talk to anyone. I can be around people for hours without feeling any need to talk to anyone. I can come home and waste hours doing nothing. Then, like tonight, I can keep myself awake for hours with worry and regrets. With a longing for some kind of connection with someone that I don't have.

I really don't understand it.