"A Season of Loneliness"

As we enter the beginning of the holiday season and people , friends, family all hunker down with each other to feel the love and the safety that comes with this love, I stand alone.

 I once had these kind of holiday seasons, full of friendship, family and love, but they have been slowly stripped from me one brick at a time till my emotional foundation was like the end game piece of a Jenga game. Some of my friends and family are lost to me through natural reasons, people come in your life and people go. I think about a lot of them but they do not hold heavy on my soul. There are the friends and family that have passed away, many of them to were not bricks that held part of my emotional life together.

 The ones that hurt, the losses that rip out my soul are those of my close family and friends. This is my first holiday season without any real family or circle of friends. This year it was the loss of my father, before that my mother and before that my best friend, my wife Jay. I have lost friends due to my mental illness and the damage that it causes, some where family but most are friends.

 So I sit and watch commercials, shows, news stories, tweets and facebook messages all beginning to talk about the holidays. And they are killing my soul, stealing what is left of my humanity and ability to love. I am dying and there may not be many holiday seasons left for me. But I fear they will all be alone. This is not the time of year to develop new friends and to be welcomed inside from the cold because all are already nesting, planning for the season.

 The most difficult thing in my mental illness is the loneliness, that hollow helpless soul crushing loneliness. It forces people to keep a distance but let them close enough for me to see. My best friends, either live to far away, or have a family of their own. There is no blame to be given, I was just the odd one out. I should be grateful ,blah, blah, blah, for what I once had. I am and I miss it.

 The one time a year that you know you have and are not a have not is when someone says, "You are welcome here, you for this season are family". I am not alone in this feeling thousands feel it every year, and thousands more will next year.

 I am facing my rabbit hole of depression, questioning everything in my life, wondering what I have done wrong and what I can do, if anything to salvage a life out of what I have. A life without people to share it with, the tears, the laughter, the quiet normalcy, is little of a life. For some this is ok, for me years ago this may have been fine. But to me now, after I have tasted the wine of companionship it is not. This season may be a watermark for me. I may get the answer to my pain. The pain and human void that this disease, this horrifically isolating disease has brought me.