Act I, Scene III

"Life's a stage." I feel I live that phrase. My life is an act, a show. I try so hard not to care what people think of me, yet I live my life ensuring they don't know the real me. My performance is good, though it is not perfect. Those closest too me know there's something different about me, but no one is able to put their finger on it. Most people are unaware of my issues. I'm able to cover them up. Even my social ineptitude I'm able to cover up by feigning a strong presence, confidence, and interest in others. Few people, if any, would look at my interactions with people and say I lack social skills though much of what I do has been researched, studied, and is based on imitating behavior I see in others. None of it is real.

Now, looking at the true me, the facts become clear. I have no true friends, only social acquaintances, and they are all "group based". When I spend time with people, it is only within a group which I have managed to attach myself to, however there exist no personal connections within any of these social groups. I have been single since I was a freshman in high school (before I began to lose my sense of self). Place me in a room full of people and I will sit silently until it becomes absolutely necessary to talk with someone, and then on the other side of the coin, force me to spend time with someone, even a "friend" (as opposed to an enemy), hours on end for months on end, and I will still feel no personal bond or connection between us. Quite simply, I am incapable of being true friends with anyone.

(My phone just rang... it was a wrong number)

I'm blaming it on my inability to be a genuine person, and of course the paradox is if I was truly genuine I would not even be able to retain acquaintances. I've been nick named the "Lone Wolf" by those who know me because they see I don't keep anyone's company. They see I will sit in a room, alone, for hours and they interpret that as me not needing company, because they believe if I wanted company, I would make company; someone with my self-confidence and sense of humor has no problem talking to people and making friends, right? The truth is I sit in my room alone because I don't know what else to do, talking to people is a chore, and I don't even know what it feels like anymore to be someone's "friend".

I used to have lots of friends, real friends, people who's company I actually enjoyed; I didn't just spend time with them to keep up appearances. Then I changed and I stopped making friends, I forgot how, and the friends I had began slowly drifting away.

The tragedy isn't that I "have no friends". No one would say that. The tragedy is that at some point I lost a big part of me that made me human. Now I'm trying to figure out what it was, and I'm trying to figure out how to get it back. Until then however, it's back to the act.