When I was in 7th grade, the girl I'd been in love with for five years got together

with one of my friends.

I remember hiding papers with hearts and our names drawn on them in a secret drawer
of my desk. As if the physical representation of my crush was a hidden treasure.
Then, coming to school to see her flirting with my friend and worrying that the
worst might come to pass. And then ...

... it did. But I didn't seem to mind so much!

I was looking down at something I was drawing or writing on. My feet were clicking
together under the desk. I was shy, awkward, a little strange, perhaps. They were
on the seats next to me, very cool and charismatic,playing footsie. Of course, I
wanted to play footsie with this girl and be high-spirited. But the weight in my
heart was not overpowering. I was gunuinely happy for them. He was my friend, a
good guy, and I believed they would be a good couple.

Their relationship continued on, back and forth, for years. There was drama,
heartbreak, apparently lots and lots of sex. I would have sex for the first time
only four years later. But I wasn't jealous. Still crushing, but not jealous, not
in pain and not grieving.

I have spent most my life like this. As if, somehow, I've been steeped in some
golden paint of emotional invincibility that protects me from envy and jealousy.
Sure, sadness, apathy, boredom, disappointment and self-loathing I got in spades.
But envy is a burden I've not had to carry.

But this changed.

The woman I love and pine for left me suddenly and without much explanation or
closure. Mostly, she just gave very mixed signals. In fact, she was vague to the
point of almost inviting me back in her goodbye-letter. I had to map out the
emotional content in an excel sheet and did find, indeed, that all her wishes and
expressions cancelled out to a perfect +/- 0 in the end.

Oh well, I thought, I do like break-ups. So healthy, so full of sense. I'm happy

she had the courage to act for her needs and we didn't have to drag the confusion
out.

Then, however, she got me excluded from our friend group, turning our friends
against me with hatred in their eyes. Even my childhood friend, whom I'd known
since way before this context, distanced himself. He didn't answer my calls and,
was it my imagination, or did he suddenly partake in the group more actively than
before?

This co-incided with similar events in other areas of my life. Everyone left me. I
was abandoned. No conversation, no explanation, no negotiation or criteria for my
return. Just exclusion. From work, family, friends, new friends, new flirts. All
gone, bye.

This, I realize now, is what my jealousy is about. Exclusion.

What would have been a break-up like any other, a relief perhaps, despite the
seemingly unrequited love, turned into a mythical, otherworldly, almost cosmic
event. Suddenly, there was a delineation between the time before the break-up and
the time after. The world had been structured, the rules laid out. There was
happiness before, and now complete and total misery in every way imaginable. There
had been friendship, co-operation, jokes, romance, secret meetings and love
letters, work and general optimism in life. Now there was six months of desolate
solitude in every way imaginable, with hardly anyone to even talk about it to.

At first, it was just a challenging situation and I hadn't yet found my footing.
But as it dragged on, it became clear just how large of a hole had been torn in the
fabric of my reality. It took a long, long while before I hit the floor of the pit
and the veil was withdrawn to show the face of my new enemy. And once I had hit the
ground, when having to climb my way all the way back up, the invisible and
unexpected burden of jealousy hit me like a truck.

The dreams, the fantasies, the fear... the utter fear. I was shaking and crying at
the idea that maybe, maybe this childhood friend of mine was distancing himself
because he wanted to date this woman and they would be a happy couple. It
disintegrated me. I could lay for hours at night, tensed up, my jaws hurting from
anxiety, and consider how bad things could get. And this was just based on pure
speculation. Or I had seen some neutral, probably work-related social media post
liked by one of them. Still, it was possible this was going on. Or was it even a
complete certainty beyond the shadow of a doubt? Yes. Yes, the liking on social
media, combined with his distancing, combined with her getting me excluded from the
group - it was clear as day.

Whoa, that's not facts, someone would eventually tell me as I slowly regained
social activity, you're having a little paranoia! Paranoia? Oh, what a relief! This
was not actually happening, perhaps, probably, okay. But then these paranoid
experiences kept coming back. I argue this is because though the scenes played out
through paranoia aren't happening, it's a very real experience and it's based on
very real events. This can be true even if these events are not the subjects of the
feelings. I had been devalued, de-humanized and excluded from my groups in a very
harsh way. This was not purely the effects of my paranoid, love sick mind. This was
me, trying to imagine a future for myself and meeting my experiences from the past
as obstacles for even my basic needs. This was the effects of trauma.

Yes, of course I'm scared. How was I to carry a hope for my future, when things had
proven to take such an extremely bad turn? Seemingly also without me being
responsible or able to address it. I was a victim of a cruel conspiracy to enslave
and then torture my heart, only to leave it out in the cold forever.

I continued on in this way for quite a while. Things slowly got better in some
parts of life and it would help ease things in other parts too, and some of my
spirits and health would return bit by bit. But I was still crushed, sick with
contempt or fear or love or paranoia or something, or all of that. Well, I say was,
but I still am at the time of writing. It's a heavy, consuming and exhausting
reality for me, as if there won't be much left of me soon and any moment they'll
pick up my decaying, walking corpse and pour me over some fields as fertilizer.

No, it hasn't ended and I'm not convinced it ever truly will. But I've learned
something very valuable about it. I'm not, in fact, alone. This experience is
telling me that the hundred to a thousand people relevant to my life are all
ganging up on me to make my time here as miserable as humanly possible. But this
experience is actually shared by most of them too. It's human. I'm human. My life
is filled with suffocating black smoke of heart-ache because I'm human. We're all
like this, and we're all connected. Not despite the pain, but especially from the
pain. It is our pains that brings us together.

Good. Lesson learned!

Now, let me get my girl back and my job and my friends and my fucking life you sick
shits! I know you're reading