But I remember everything.......

[I]"I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
[SIZE="7"][B]But I remember everything"[/B] [/I]
[/SIZE]

I think differently now that I am older and yet the pain never truly goes away but then how can it? All our memories are the sum of what we are, they make you and they form you into your present personality. Your body may be what you eat but your mind and everything that goes with it is what you have ever experienced, all your memories. The years of loneliness at school and at work, feeling different and always an outsider. Not being allowed to join in because I was strange, quiet, and different. In my junior school this was increased by being overweight so I had the usual fatty jokes etc and embarrassment at PE and gym sessions, of being in the shower with other boys who thought nothing of ridicule and saying I had tits.

You see when you are young and there is something wrong with you nobody blames you. Your age is your innocence and your legitimate excuse for anything that goes wrong. Then when you hit adulthood everything is your own fault almost overnight. If you have trouble getting a job or do badly at college or university it’s apparently entirely up to you and there is no one else to blame. Yet your mind may not be that much different from a few years earlier and what you have become whether a success or failure is dependant upon your childhood. Its hardly a coincidence that so many people in deprived areas get poor grades and struggle to find decent jobs if anything at all whereas so many who went to Eton/Harrow etc end up in government, in the city on £1million bonuses or even acting in American prime time shows.

I wonder how much of my brain, my personality is changeable. Can I really alter the rewiring by doing something differently over and over again as cognitive therapy is supposed to achieve? Surely you have to have success to build positive emotions and not more fear and more avoidance. Is it even too late for me now? If by some miracle a level of normality and happiness is attainable now, would still the many years of loneliness, isolation and the constant longing still haunt me and define my moods. I have heard many times that to gain a level of contentment you must have first gone through and experienced misery and despair and this makes your happiness that much more special but I don’t really believe it. Many happy people are this way because they have always been happy and had a particularly contented and well balanced childhood. They have never known true misery and desperation. By contrast miserable people almost always had an unhappy upbringing or something bad that happened to them to make them this way. I also doubt that other people are that kind, understanding or benevolent or willing to help if you have problems, even on here. The struggle is not only a struggle against your own personal demons; it’s a struggle against human nature and evolution and culture, of millions of years of what defines us as normal. It sometimes becomes incredibly tiring to just keep trying,to keep living, to keep hoping when you see no evidence whatsoever of a happy ending.