Diary of a Prisoner No parole allowed

In my previous post I mentioned how my mind sometimes races and paranoia kicks in, as it did on irc when I was being ignored. It went like this: on irc, each user has a counter called the idle time, which tells you how much time has elapsed since that user said anything to anyone. It normally doesn’t show unless you’re on the same server, but there’s a way to request that anyway (just running the whois command with the recipient mentioned twice). It often happened that I was talking with someone in private chat, and they stopped replying. After a while they would say they had to leave the computer, something pretty odd to begin with since at the time you were not always-on and you made the most out of each minute you stayed online given that you did indeed pay by the minute, and that’s why they had stopped talking. Except they were lying: looking at their idle time I could see very clearly that it continuously reset to very low values, meaning they were indeed talking, just ignoring me. I’m aware that it’s borderline paranoia, but is it really paranoia when it’s true?

That’s been the common thread in my life: being ignored and, pretty often, just dumped without a word or an explanation. That’s why I’m so insecure around people, that’s why I have a hard time believing in “forever”, or that I am interesting at all for anyone. Most of the times I am the one who has to seek out others even just for a hello, and trust me, I’ve tried. I’ve tried not looking for anyone for a few days and the truth is that nobody looks for me first, except in rare cases. And looking for those clues of being ignored, something that modern-day messaging platforms make very easy, literally too easy, by means of double checkmarks or “last online” notices that cannot be hidden, has almost turned into a form of psychological self-harm. But again, is it self-harm or is it just me trying to find anything that’s actually true and real in the midst of all the fakeness?

And so my mind starts racing. Yesterday that friend of mine stated she was on the train, and a story on instagram gave a clue that she was bound for the city where that guy is. Good for her if he’s good to her. And yet it hurts, and again it’s not jealousy. It’s that she’s got the guts to hop on a train that covers literally half the country, and I wasn’t able to make myself go to my old school for the orientation event (it would have been nice to see it again after so many years and I may have met someone there too). And the worst part is that our friendship is taking a toll. She doesn’t talk to me because she doesn’t want to hurt me with those things, which are indeed important to her; and I don’t talk to her for fear of saying anything that makes her say anything about that. And yesterday I saw she hadn’t used a messenger we use for hours, and I thought: she’s enjoying her time with him. And every time I opened instagram I was scared, and still am, to see something about them together, or hint that they spent the night together, sharing a kind of intimacy that I haven’t experienced in a long time. It’s like furiously running that double whois command on irc to see if I was being ignored; and the worst thing is that part of me clearly wants to be wrong, but part of me appreciates that I was right, even though it’s the worst outcome. At least I’m not completely wrong about everything, in a sense. But at what cost? What’s the advantage of being right about something painful?

And the really worst part is that it’s someone I care about, I truly do. And I hate feeling like this sort of ancestral resentment towards her because I’m supposed to be her friend, and I would like to be her friend. I’d like to be happy for her when she’s happy and support her when she’s not; and until recently I have sort of managed, but things took a turn for the worst recently for me and it turned into envy, something I absolutely hate myself for. She shouldn’t be losing a friend because that friend’s got his own issues. It’s unfair. And it makes me hate myself further.

How do I get out it?