My telephone line kicked the bucket again. This aggravation has caused hell for me now for three days. I had to call my telephone company again from a payphone. I'll have to post-date my entries here. This fucking pisses me off.

I still feel so depressed. I'm probably going to say that hundreds of times in this journal. It's true. Failure always follows me. I've said that before, too. When it comes to anything negative, I'll probably repeat myself.

I just feel so much emotional pain. It makes me want to cry sometimes. Often I don't cry because I'm almost completely desensitized to all my emotions. This probably comes from when I was younger. I was conditioned to believe that all that matters are actions and results. If I had any emotions that interfered with completing a given task, I had to disregard them. Over time, this caused undesirable side effects. It had the effect of making me fail to recognize many emotions. Whenever I chatted with someone and the subject of my feelings came up, most of the time I had no idea what I felt, thanks to a lifetime of ignoring my emotions. This prevented me from being able to form many close relationships, because sharing my true emotions allows me to feel closer to someone. Also, I have virtually no spontaneity. I need to learn to react to my emotions naturally if I want that. To me, not having spontaneity forms a real barrier to making friendships.

Speaking of friendships, another obstacle for me is to suppress my emotions in order to avoid making the other person uncomfortable in any way. Some people call this "people-pleasing." I force myself to like whatever the other person likes. I almost never express any negative emotions because I believe this will minimize any potential friction between the other person and me. Expressing negative emotions terrifies me if it causes anger in the other person. Unfortunately, I end up shooting myself in the leg. By not expressing my true emotions, the other person never gets to know the real me.

I can't carry on feeling as much emotional pain as I do for much longer. Right now, I deal with it by distracting myself from the pain as much as possible. Luckily, I can do this. If I had unrelenting physical pain, nothing could distract me from that.

Writing this journal helps a little. I could never do this before, because it seemed futile to write down things that other people would never see. Writing in the journal had no meaning for me. Now it does because of a little trick I made up. When I write an entry, I pretend that I write to someone who deeply, deeply cares about what I do and how I feel. This imaginary person feels sad whenever I feel sad, and feels pain whenever I feel pain. I feel like I'm sharing my burden with someone because I'm making another human being aware of the unbearable pain and suffering I've gone through for the past eleven years. (One may argue that if I managed to survive for eleven years, why can't I survive for eleven more? I can't because I feel the desire to die on a daily basis. If this urge is left unchecked, I will kill myself. There is no light at the end of my tunnel. I can only see into the future for a few days. After that, I don't have the foggiest idea how I will survive. It'll be equally likely that by that time I'll be dead rather than alive.) I may sound like I'm fishing for sympathy. I'm not because I don't care whether the other person responds to me or not. All that matters to me is that I won't be suffering in silence, which to me is a fate worse than death.

Of course, the key word here is pretending. This whole thing might make me sound like a lunatic. Lunacy or not, I must do this in order to survive. In my condition, I need as many ways as possible of hanging on to life, even if it means concocting an imaginary friend. It's similar to believing in God in Christianity. Its first commandment mandates that one must believe in God, even in the absence of any physical evidence. As defined, God does not manifest himself in the physical world. The existence or nonexistence of such an entity cannot be proven. Therefore, one must have faith in order to believe in God. This faith is exactly the same as my belief in my imaginary journal-friend.

So far, it works. I'm worried that at some point in the future, I'll think that this whole deal was just an enormous waste of time. I hope this won't happen because I have a motive -- I want to do anything possible to make my never-ending pain more bearable. After all, even if I did stop doing this, I wouldn't be any worse off than before.