Soul-searching (a much more recent draft)

Here I think I'm starting to inch up towards some kind of moment of clarity. Again, I must not have finished because it was saved as a draft. I will leave it as is.

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In every situation there comes a time when you think to yourself: this isn't working. It may be a slight nuance, the realization that your fly is down or there's a blob of ketchup on your chin; or it may be a full blown existential crisis in which you question your whole conception of yourself and how you fit in with the world and the society of which you are ostensibly a part.

I'm the kind of guy who will cruise along for months or years with a "this isn't working" feeling. I'll try to ignore it, try to integrate it with my self-image, project out, but it will keep gnawing at me until I kick the critical leg from under it and the resulting avalanche buries me. I put up with a lot of pain before I blow up, but I eventually do blow up. It's happened several times before. One very painful incident ultimately cost me a friend and led me to finally acknowledge that I suffered from depression and to seek treatment for it.

The most recent one, I think, will also eventually push me in a healthier direction. But this time I don't think medication will be the route to salvation--rather it will be my own actions.

I've always felt like an outsider. As soon as I was venturing outside of my family and meeting with the outside world, I began perceiving it as a hostile place. Without going into all the lurid details of my childhood, I've pretty much gone through my entire life feeling that wherever I went people were actively trying to keep me out. Not necessarily specific people--I have made a lot of good friends, who I'm grateful for--but society in general. Here's one way I've thought about it: for some time I've perceived a kind of mismatch between my inclinations, tastes, and aspirations, and the circumstances in which I lived my life. I generally think of those in terms of socieconomic class; basically, I'm a middle- to upper-middle-class type person who was, through no choice of my own, raised in a fairly rough working class environment. I've never really been able to be comfortable in either world. The kids I went to school with used to beat me up. The clean-cut respectable kids I went to college with mostly ignored me.

For some reason, I've always tended to ally myself with the working class crowd; I don't know why, probably just out of nostalgia or familiarity. I don't really identify with them culturally anymore. I do feel a lot more comfortable with the run down turn-of-the-century duplexes and grass-cracked sidewalks of the North Campus area I grew up in, than with the posh manicured McMansions of affluent suburbia--I would even consider living in the old neighborhood again--but I don't really care for the culture. Maybe it's because nowadays there are more grad students than the old locals living there.