For something that’s so easy to fake, composure sure counts for a lot, doesn’t it? Crack a few jokes now and then, and you can almost fool yourself into thinking everything is just peachy.

…okay, I’ll be totally honest, which is totally normal: I don’t really know where I’m going with this one. But I’m not really writing for you, whoever you are. I’m writing because I used to get a lot of mysterious value out of broadcasting my internal truths with a reckless disregard to the eventual audience (but, you know, with a sufficient amount of vagueness to safely keep specific other people out of my weird life choices), and I’m sort of fishing for coping mechanisms tonight, so I guess it’s back to the old ways. So here we go.

For the record, I’m having a pretty lousy time over here lately, which I’m pretty sure anybody would agree would be imminently understandable if I went over the current situation, which I won’t. In actuality, if I wasn’t feeling essentially terrible every time I got a minute to stop and think about it, I’d be seriously worried about the status of my humanity.

In this, at least, I have no reason to be worried about the status of my humanity. Sometimes it is completely appropriate to be bone-twistingly sad for some nontrivial amount of time. It is also completely normal for somebody like me going through one of those times, to automatically fall back on acting any time I have the chance of being observed. Overt sympathy is a terrifying prospect I’d rather avoid.

…generally. People who recognize that quiet human proximity is intrinsically valuable even (especially?) if it’s not actively “helping”, are wonderful. There is a universe of difference between those rare people, and the majority of the people who seem to want to save you from your genuine feelings by having a ton of “fun” (not actually fun; feel worse), try to logic it out of you (won’t work; don’t try), or invariably end up turning it all in to some kind of right-to-sadness contest (please die in a fire).

It is, however, bizarrely difficult to ask for simple company, isn’t it? Particularly so, it seems, when I actually need to, and particularly from the people who I know are excellent at that kind of thing, possibly entirely by accident. All the difference in the world frequently comes down to my failing ability to manufacture some reasonably believable pretence that will hold up for a few hours.

This is the first time that I have lived alone, since about a three month stint in 2007 that I never figured out how to enjoy. What happens if I never do?