What Bothers Me?

Years ago I started to see a psychiatrist, Stanley R. Palombo, MD, in Washington, DC. At about that time Malcolm Lassman said to my sister, "What is it that bothers him? There must be something that bothers him? He needs to talk about what it is that bothers him."

To tell you the truth, I don't know what it is that bothers me. I mean I can talk about trivial things. For example, it bothers me that I have to wait to get onto the computer at the library. It bothers me when the price of strawberries goes up. It bothers me that Social Security won't be paying out a cost of living adjustment this year. But those kinds of things bother everybody. Or nearly everybody. Not everybody is on Social Security, of course. And not everybody eats strawberries.

But the bigger things, the more cosmic things that bother me are basically a mystery to me. I don't really know what it is that bothers me. At times, I suppose people think something is bothering me when in fact nothing is bothering me. For example, at work I used to sit at my desk all day and work and not socialize with people. I guess some people might infer that something was bothering me. Maybe people wondered why I just sat at my desk instead of getting up and chatting with coworkers. Well, the fact is I'm not a chatter. When I go to work, I like to work. When I work, my emotional investment is in working. I don't have an investment in chatting with other people. So that's an example of other people perhaps inferring that something was bothering me when, in fact, nothing was bothering me.

I live alone. I don't have friends. I'm a full time loner. People say, "Do you want friends?" Honestly? I don't know. I don't know if I want to be with another person or other people. I fantasize about having a friend: someone to sit on a park bench with and watch the pigeons. But I don't know if I have a realistic desire to have a friend, or whether my wish for a friend is simply a fantasy. I also think about winning the Maryland lottery. Now, do I really want to win the Maryland lottery, or do I have a fantasy of winning the Maryland lottery?

When I'm around other people, say, for example, at a social gathering, I tend to remain off to the side. I tend not to mingle with people. People say, "Are you shy? Are you afraid of rejection? Why do you just stand off to the side instead of mixing with other people?"

Well, now we are on to something, I think. How do I feel about strangers? I feel alien. I feel I have nothing in common with most people. I believe that, objectively speaking, I have little in common with most people. It's not simply a silly notion I have. I firmly believe in my alienness. When I talk to strangers I feel foreign. I feel that the strangers are foreign to me. I rarely have any sense of connection with people. I don't get any sense of gratification from talking to most people. What bothers me in this context? I would say my inability to feel any sense of commonality with most people -- or any people -- bothers me. But I wouldn't say that my feelings are a neurotic fear. I would say my sense that I am alien is an objective reality.

Dr. Palombo, my former psychiatrist, once said to me, "you're not as different from other people as you think." I don't know how he could say that. I suffer from a psychiatric disorder that affects less than 1 percent of the population. So we can state as objective fact that I am unlike more than 99 percent of people in significant ways.

Several years ago, I was fired from my job. Most people in my situation try to find another job. Instead, I spent eleven years stringing quotes together from books -- literally. That's a strange preoccupation. That's objectively alien. I am indeed unlike anyone I have ever met.

To answer Malcolm Lassman's question -- namely, what is it that bothers me? Mr. Lassman, I don't know. I just feel tormented. But I don't know what it is that torments me. Is there some reason why I should know the answer to that question, Mr. Lassman?