Am I Alone?

Does anyone else ever feel alone? Like not alone as in i'm by myself, but that even with all these people around you, you still feel like no one sees you?

In the aquarium that is life itself, you’re the hermit crab on the bottom no one pays attention to, because the sharks and colorful fish are so much cooler. And you go through the day saying hi to everyone and wondering why you feel this way, because you have all these people who know you, but do they really?

Speaking from experience I can say that I've kept a secret or two from people, and it made me feel like I was watching life from the window side of a two way mirror, and no one knew I was there. Sure, they did, but the secrets I kept from them put a metaphorical wall between us.

I was so scared that they would find out what I desperately wanted to stay hidden that I prevented them from knowing really anything about me.

“Hey,” they’d ask, “how’s it going?”

“Good.”

“Do anything fun lately?”

“No.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah.”

The end.

My conversations are cut short, and they think I'm really antisocial or I don’t like them, crisis averted.

Except now I have no one to talk to. I've isolated myself, and I can’t share the one thing I want, no, need people to know.

The thing about keeping secrets is I'm really good at it. I have this reputation in my family of being the best secret keeper. Anyone wants to tell someone something, but doesn’t want anyone to know? Just tell me.

The thing is I'm such a good secret keeper, because I have my own secrets I don’t want to get out.

I mean, sure, that means nothing, and I could keep my own secrets and still spill others, but I'm scared that if I share someone else’s secret mine would come out too.

I read in a blog post recently that keeping secrets can have negative affects on our mental health. One of the obvious affects being anxiety about the secret. Many people may assume that anxiety about keeping secrets mostly occurs in conversations where the secret can come out, but most of the time its worrying before the conversation even happens that you might spill the secret.

Maybe it's because I already have anxiety, and think about everything way too much already, but I don’t feel like secrets, at least other people’s, affects my mental health. I'm just not worried that I'll tell someone. Unless it’s a secret that could harm someone if its kept secret, in which case I tell someone I trust. But most of the time I'm confident in my abilities to keep people’s secrets.

I think the reason I feel so alone is that deep down I want to tell people my secrets. The ones I'm keeping about myself, but I'm terrified of how they’ll react. We all want to believe that the people who love us, love us no matter what, but the anxiety creeps in and says, but what if they don’t?

What if this whole thing about people loving you is a sham? That they’re all just pretending, and you fell for the trap. Sucker. How could you be so stupid?

And the logical part of my brain knows that’s unrealistic and not true, but the anxiety peeps back in and says, but are you sure??

And no, I'm not sure. How can you ever be 100 percent sure you know what people think of you?

Thus, I feel alone. My brain keeps isolating me from everyone else in ways it matters using anxiety, secrets, and fear of abandonment. Maybe one day I'll feel comfortable enough to share these secrets with people, and they’ll still love me. Maybe I'll live with them till the day I die. All I know is I don’t want to feel alone and continue keeping people at arm’s length, but I'm not sure how to change that.