[serendipity]

It's difficult to even post this question: embarrassing as the fact that at 25 I live with my parents, with whom I don't get on. But needs must: I'm chronically lonely, and worse, pathologically incapable of starting the online business I dream of.

Like all idiots who do this to themselves, I haven't a clue how to put it right because I didn't take enough notice of the downhill slide to this point. Though Lord knows I must have looked mad, first gloomy in my work, then anorectic, then fired, then cutting off all social ties to friends who I didn't really like anyway.

Since last November I've been unemployed, living with the folks, my head stuffed full of an online empire "when I get myself sorted". But when will that be? How will it be? Not a clue. At hobby clubs and social events, in random conversations with strangers I encounter walking through my native London, I feel this strange lethargy press down on my chest...all that pops into my head are polite insincerities, such as I entertained my old "friends" with (and God how painful was my perennial hyena grin!), otherwise...confusions, troubles that I want to work through because they are uppermost on my mind...I suppose a good dose of moaning too, such as would send me screaming naked into the desert if somebody tried it with me. (No agony aunt, I!) Or maybe it's not moaning I need. Maybe I just need to cry. Can you imagine a stranger asking you to listen to them cry? Asking you for a hug? *moue of disgust* I return home every time out of pocket and lost. The hole in my chest sighs wider open.

And yet. And yet. Square one of loneliness and uselessness, violins screeching in my ears alone - living should not be such a headache.

I wish I could explain the feeling properly: worse than winter cold seeping in through the bones, through the spongy pith of the lungs, freezing the brain and heart itself until it feels like you're looking at the world through glass. No, worse: through the ice that crusts over the lake in which you are drowning. In the past I would have laughed at such histrionics...I do believe - or thought I believed - that nothing except death is a tragedy, all else can be laughed at, repaired. But for now I am, as I've said, useless, and reach out - blushing, yearning - to you for help on how to break the deadlock...

AFTERTHOUGHT: Sorry I just realised I should have posted in the social board...just shows where my head is :-p