Regret pt. 3

One night I had a terrible dream. It had been four years since I dropped out of high school and I was still depressed and suicidal. In the dream, I was still 18 years old, but I was meeting with all of my high school friends like S and C and they were 40. Somehow I was stuck in time while they went on with their lives. C was married and had children.

The next day I registered for night classes to finish high school. After that, I registered for university and eventually got a degree in physics. I didn’t really like physics, but it took me four years to figure that out. And I given that I didn’t like it very much, I wasn’t very good at it, either. I’ll talk about that later.

I didn’t really know what to do with a degree in physics (and a degree with some very mediocre grades behind it), so I spent another four years in school getting another degree, this time in computing science. It worked well for me given that I had already spent four years in a basement room working on a computer. It was something I was good at, but I don’t think that it really challenged me, in the ways that I needed to be challenged. I now think that I probably should have gone into an arts program instead.

During this whole time I lived at home. I didn’t date, I didn’t have any friends, I didn’t socialize. I didn’t go to parties or concerts, I didn’t take advantage of the university social scene, and I didn’t have any much fun. I was sleepwalking through life – depressed, negative, and uncommunicative. I didn’t know how to make friends. I didn’t know that I could make friends. I know that it sounds silly, but at the time I thought that most people just kept the friends that they had in school and after that you didn’t make new ones. The thought of asking another human being to go out for a drink or something seemed strangely impossible.

I’m really angry and frustrated about this right now. I’m going through a sort of mid-life crisis, at age 35. I missed my twenties because of clinical depression and social isolation. Why did it have to be that way?

Much of my regret is cast into sharp relief against my wife and her experiences. My wife has had a lot of friends and a lot of lovers over the years. She had a lot of boyfriends, and even a few one night stands. My wife left home when she was 18. She lived as an independent adult, working jobs, attending school, making friends, meeting people, and engaging the world. This makes me really angry. Why was I living as a shut-in when my wife was out in the world? Why didn’t I get treatment for my depression? Damn it, I missed my twenties, and I’ll never get them back.

My wife has had so many experiences that I haven’t had. She moved out of her house and worked at a hardware store where she started sleeping with the store manager. She had a stormy relationship with a band drummer in university, and left him when she found out he was cheating on her. She drank like a fish when she was young and tried smoking weed.

What did I have? I spent 10 years living in my mom’s basement. My only lovers were in my imagination, my only one-night-stands were masturbating myself. I yearned for companionship, but I didn’t know how to get it. I thought it was impossible, when it was always within sight along a convoluted path of self-realization, making peace with oneself, and socializing.

I don’t know what to do at this point. I don’t feel like I’m ‘even’ with my wife. She mentions how she goes to lunch with ex-boyfriends and I wish that I had ex-girlfriends to talk to. She mentions things that she’s done with ex-lovers like golfing or rock-climbing and I don’t feel comfortable doing those things anymore. I’m tired of her being my ‘teacher’, but I have so much less ‘life’ to draw on that it seems like we’re always doing something that’s already in her past.