A Study in Loneliness

Hi guys,

I've never posted on a forum about the kind of thing about which I am about to write before, so I beg your forgiveness if this is not the kind of thing about which one posts. However, I've been reliably told that getting things which bother me off my chest will help with the situation with which I am currently faced - even if it is purely through finding a digital shoulder to cry on or ear to bend.

By way of a preface, I feel I ought to tell you, my reader, about what has brought me to the stage at which I feel the need to spout off on the internet to people that I do not know and most likely will never meet but somehow trust through the power of digital anonymity. The first point of which the interest reader ought to be aware is that I suffer from cyclothymia - for the uninitiated, this is a mood disorder that causes similar symptoms to that of bipolar disorder but with shallower peaks and valleys. I am, essentially, a diet manic depressive.

However, it is not my mental disorder, demanding and enabling as it is in equal measure, with which I seek to trouble the reader this evening; it's the rest of my life.

For the longest time, I focused on three aspects of aspects of my life which were causing me pain and suffering. My professional life had been utterly shattered - the initial crack having appeared when I lost the job of a lifetime, through no fault of my own. It was one of those ubiquitous "restructuring" deals; I can still smell the bullshit wafting from it. Secondly, I was a 28 year old man still living with my parents - the combination of joblessness and having only recently graduated from university meaning that I had not the means to get a place of my own. Finally, and most relevantly, I was single. In terms of further understand, in this case the word "single" should be read with the same severity as a man shot in the heart being referred to as "dying" or dental surgery without anesthetic being described as "a little bit sore". I was, and as the more astute reader will have cleverly deciphered still am, painfully, almost medically, single. I have only ever had two partners in my life - both of whom are married (blessedly, not to one another) - and I have been single for over half a decade.

Since then, I have found a job and an apartment that I, by varying degrees, love/like/pass by with complete negligent indifference and, you would think, have gone quite a way towards sorting out the thunderclap of misery that I call my life.

The question(s) I wish to pose, dear reader, is this...... Why am I still miserable?

Why is it that, despite having sorted out 2/3rds of what I had established were my problems, I still continue to feel like a worthless, pointless, ugly, rotund, mundanity? Why is it that I am, despite it taking up much of my efforts and a large degree of attention, unable to find a boyfriend? Why is it that everyone I know, as I continue the deathly march towards the point at which gay people die socially, otherwise known as my 30th birthday, has settled down/gotten married/is dating/is having tonnes of carefree sex and I am sitting on the sidelines? Why is it that my flatmate, my exes, my friends, everyone I meet, and all the people across the world seem to be capable of finding at least one other person to complete them and make their lives just that little bit less of a combination between tragedy and black comedy? Why is it that I am so completely and utterly unloveable? Why is it that I don't know how to do what everyone else seems to know intrinsically? Why am I the one who is destined to be the old man (this is my own personal nightmare) who is standing at the same gay bar I will have been going to for decades, my friends all being married or dead by this point, being soaked for drinks by the same gorgeous, bubble headed twinks that both outstrip me romantically and evade me today? Why am I seemingly fated to die alone? Why am I the patient zero for my local strain of the ugly and undatable virus?

Why me?