It's probably a bad idea to start writing this at this time...

Because it is late at night and I just lost my first draft of like a solid third of the blog and this is a long complex thought that has multiple nuances to it and some of the information pertaining to it was already deleted in my brain due to being typed out and then removed.

But basically.
I am selfish;
I am a narcissist;
I am arrogant;
I am self-centered;
I am demanding;
I have an overly inflated feeling of entitlement;
I think I deserve more than I have right to;
I am everything that I despise in seeing people who are the type of being I loathe;
I am someone who wants more than what I have been given;
I am someone who is this and so much more. (Sorry, I typed out at least 2-3 better descriptions the first time that were deleted due to weebly being absolute crap at saving your work when things go wrong.)

Basically, to explain why I am saying this and what the issue is.

I am a member of multiple communities--but I am just a member of those communities. Nothing more. Admittedly, nothing less! And that's where the guilt and self-loathing comes in. I should be content with being a member of those communities! Being a member of those communities is a blessing, one that I cherish. I love being part of those communities and having them in my life brings a gigantic smile to me.

​But that makes the guilt so much worse. I have an internal self-loathing, a hatred of myself, because I feel like I am betraying the very core of those communities, the ones that welcome people with open arms, are friendly, but make it clear in no uncertain terms that being there is a gift and that people who're jerks will not be tolerated.

So what does it say about me that behind my surface demeanor as a member of their community, that I am the jerk that I hate the most? That I am the very thing I despise. I hate people who feel like they are owed more; I hate people who feel like the community is cheating them and not appreciating their work; I hate that mindset because it is an incredibly toxic one and unhealthy and a sign that someone has a fundamentally wrong view of what it means to be in the community.

But I hold similar thoughts to them. I love being part of the communities, cherish them more than anything else in the world...but I can't get over the part that while I am nothing less than a community member, I am also nothing more​. One voice among many. A single cog in the machine. A small part of the wheel. Someone who you notice most not when they're absent, but when they return from an absence.

In most of these communities, I just...don't have much staying power. People wouldn't mention me if I were to disappear. They wouldn't notice. They'd greet me back upon a return and say they missed me, but until the return, would they even realize I wasn't there? No, because being a single cog in the machine means that I am too small, too unimportant, to be worth that attention, worth that notice.

And deep down there is a very deep sense of loneliness.

I'm not such a fundamental piece of any community such that if I were to leave that community, my loss would be felt deeply. While I always provide a unique voice that is uniquely valued, I am one voice among many. Not unique. Not truly. While my exact contribution is one of a kind, I am still nothing special, nothing truly of my own, not someone who stands out.

I do things in the communities, even notable things, but nothing I do is something only I could do, and nothing I do is important enough to be a pillar of the communities. I am a member, nothing more.

And more than that.

I just feel so alone, surrounded by folks that are the closest thing I have to a second family.

​Because while the communities I am a part of are like a second family, they are an extended family with too many members to truly connect deeply with and separated by the internet and by a culture of sharing things only as they come up and only in short bursts of text. I let people know me, but only when it comes up as an organic chance for them to know something about me.

So at the end of the day...

...Nobody knows me.
Nobody is close to me.
Nobody has connected to me.

There are people that I might call friends, and if I am lucky, they would reciprocate and call me a friend, too.

But we don't interact outside of the community we're a part of.
We don't connect strongly across all aspects of the community.
We talk, we do activities together, we create things as a community, we build amazing things including irreplaceable memories.

But in spite of all that.

​I remain isolated.
​Alone.

People see me and they see Bree, sure. They know me, they interact with me, I am a part of their communities.

But I am still distanced from them on a deep level.

Because I just blend into the crowd.

I'm a part of their communities, but they never see me as anything truly more.

None of them truly see me as a friend, not in the deepest sense of the word at least. The type of friend who connects to me and talks with me regularly outside of the community, over discord or skype or similar, the type who offers to game with me specifically rather than game with the community.

In the communities, nobody would invite me, me specifically, to play with them in a game, to engage with me in a talk, to watch an anime or a movie or something with them. Activities they do with their friends. Because even if they call me a friend and genuinely think I am a friend...they don't see me in that​ intimate of a way to connect with me on that deeply personal level, able to truly see me and know me and just...connect to me.

I get occasional messages.

But nothing consistent, nothing where the spark of friendship is truly kindled over time into more.

So I remain alone.

And I remain unimportant.

Visible, but basically invisible.

Around, but not standing out.

Part of the scene, nothing more.

And I should be fine with being part of these wonderful communities.
I shouldn't need to feel important.
​I shouldn't need to feel unique.
I shouldn't feel pressured into being more than myself, to be something I am not.
I should be happy being me, in these communities, as a part of them, invisible but still notably important and while irreplaceable in exact contribution, happy to not be so important that I'm irreplaceable in a bigger way.

But I am feeling that way, because while I may be introverted...I still crave deep human connection. I connect to humanity in general really easily! I integrate into communities fairly flawlessly, become a part of them, become a notable name in them, because I connect to communities and integrate into them with great ease.

But I don't connect to any single one human. 
I connect to humanity in general but I don't connect to any single human.

And that is why I feel so invisible to the point where I am literally tearing up, the only reason I can't cry being a biological inability to.

I connect to humanity, to communities, and they in turn connect to me as part of their communities.
But I don't connect to any one human, and they in turn don't connect to me.
They don't see me, they see a member of their community.
And vice-versa is true, too. I try to see them as them on a deeper level, but I, too, just like them to me, can't truly see them as the person they are, and am held up, stuck, on them as being that member of a community.

So that leads to a very, very, very deep feeling of intense loneliness.

Especially since I know I can connect to people closer!

I connected to a very close friend group in my earlyish days on the internet and they truly were my friends. We unfortunately had our own life growth and life struggles and life issues so over time fell out of touch and the sites we used were slowly forgotten one by one, but I wasn't a member of the community to them and they weren't members of a community to me; they were my friends and I had them.

Heck, even more recently! I had a bloody girlfriend for a year and a half! And they are still a good friend! They're not a member of a community to me and I'm not a member of a community to them. So they are the proof that I can make friends even now.

But they are my only friend.

​I admit that maybe having started out romantically could've been a contributing factor to keeping them as a friend for so long, but it shouldn't be a prerequisite. And even were it, how come I haven't gotten the spark with someone else?

​I don't think I've mentioned this in my blog before, but basically, when it comes to my friend, I've come to the conclusion that I am a better friend than I ever was a girlfriend, but also more importantly: I have moved on feelings-wise.

​I realized that if I were to ever find a potential second romantic partner, I wouldn't be hung up with feelings over my first. That while they are still my good friend and I still get endorphins, feeling happy, from interacting with them and am glad to have them as my friend, that I have the ability to fall in love with someone else.

Truly, deep down in my soul, I know that I have moved on; I have a deep level of fundamental peace, feeling at ease with it in a way hard to describe as anything other than knowing I moved on.

But while I have moved on, and I could fall in love with someone else.

I haven't connected with anyone on that level enough to have found someone else to love.

I want to.

I want to find someone to love.

But even if I don't!

I want to find someone else to connect to as a friend.

I am perfectly happy forming platonic relationships; my current friend is one of the happiest relationships I can have yet we are obviously fully platonic now.

But I've got nothing.

No new friends.

I realize you can't force friendships; that doesn't lead to real, genuine friendships.
So I am not trying to force a friendship.
​But just because I'm not trying to force a friendship doesn't mean I don't actively want one and am on the search, lookout, for one.

I am always looking for the potential to connect with someone on a deep, fundamental, friendship level.

But I keep on getting disappointment after disappointment, where time after time again and again. I come to realize that the people who I've gotten closer to still see me as a member of the community, just one they are closer to than the average member of the community. And then nothing more comes of it, and then I end up seeing them the same way. Someone whose name I know, who has similar interests to me who I talk to more often than others and who I see a lot...but that's as far as things go on either side. It goes no further, it doesn't transcend the boundaries of community and go into friendship.

So I continue to feel alone, even when surrounded by a crowd of loving, caring, wonderful human beings.

And I feel horrible for wanting more from them than what they give.

And I feel despicable for thinking I deserve more.

I basically feel like I am spitting on the image of their gifts to me. That they give me so much and that by wanting more, I am insulting them, that I am proving I don't deserve the thing I want, that if they knew the thoughts I am having they would push me away, not unjustifiably so, because the things I am thinking are things that jerks who say them get banned for being jerks because it's a jerkish line of thought to be so self-centered and arrogant to think you are privileged to more than what you are given, when you are, in truth, owed nothing.

I know I am owed nothing.

But I still want something more.

I really want friends.

Having what amounts to an extended internet family is wonderful.
But I want friends, and the extended internet family dynamic isn't friendship.
I know what friendship is; I have had friendships, and in the communities, I see examples of these friendships. I see streamers on discord talks with their friends; I see friends talk about things only they are privy to, things they did as friends rather than did as a community together.

And I know that I don't have that, in spite of seeing it literally on a daily basis.

And it leaves me just...feeling so guilty for wanting what they have, in spite of knowing I should be content with what I have, and knowing that I have a lot of fault, both in not realizing the full extent of what I have and a lot of the lack of connection being my fault.

I know I can't shift the blame onto them; it's not on them, it's not their fault that they're not friends with me after all! That's pretty much on me. I don't share my voice, I don't share live video feed of me, I am not sharing aspects of my life more actively, I am passive, I am reactive, I am just...not proactive, I am a sponge that absorbs things rather than really pushing myself forward.

Right now tho I basically just feel like...if I were to die, news of my death wouldn't spread. Nobody in the communities I am in would know I had died, and aside from my friend, even if they did learn, nobody would go "my friend died". I just would vanish into a distant memory, be nothing more than that, not truly be missed, not truly be felt as a loss.

I am effectively invisible; I effectively don't exist.

But I want to exist. I realize that selfishly wanting to be visible is a bad thing. Not all visibility is a good thing; there is such a thing as bad visibility and I loathe the jerks that are that. But I just...

I want to be someone.

I want to connect.

I want to be a buddy.
I want to be a friend.
I want to be something more than I am to people now.

But I'm not.

​This is one of the reasons why I want to get into content creation of my own.
I have a tiktok for a start but I want more. Streaming could be an avenue of manifesting this content creation. So too could writing, actually making my work come real.

Because I just feel like if I truly share my work with the world en masse on a large scale, that maybe it can help with that connection.

If I form a community of my own, then while the community members of my community would just be community members of my community, I feel like just the act of building a community would open me up in a way to just...connecting to others. The connection need not be two-way, tho obviously I would love that. I just want some form of connection beyond just "you are here, and I am here, and we are in this community doing this thing and having this in common".

And I just...have nothing.

People know my name, even in spots I'd expect them to not remember me, but I remain a nobody in spite of this.

I am the most highly visible nobody of all time but still. Being a highly visible nobody is still being a nobody.

I just don't feel like I even exist.
Being greeted by name is nice, but it's not a way to feel like I exist.
Having my messages read by the streamer does make me smile, but it's not a way to feel like I exist.
Having chat members react to my messages does make me smile, but it's not a way to feel like I exist.

​The only ways I feel like I can feel like I exist are either connecting to people or creating works of my own that are distributed to the masses at large, spread virally through good word of mouth as "hey you should see this, Bree made this and it is great" as proof that I exist.

Basically, there's two ways of feeling like I exist.
A deep human bond, or a legacy of lasting work that others see, and continue to spread to others as something that has a dedicated following to it.

And I am lacking in both.

So now I am just.

Feeling so, so alone.

And so, so deeply full of self-loathing because I feel like I shouldn't feel alone when surrounded by love and kindness.

​But I am.