Apologies for the very long rambling, and lack of any real structure in this entry. That may be an indication of how erratic my thoughts are tonight.

I tend to notice those around me a lot more than I actually notice myself. Which is strange, because none of them seem to operate in the same way. Perhaps it's a psychological misconception, but I can't help but feel that no matter what situation, I'm on the outside. Then again, that is the place I chose to be, a long time ago. It wasn't really a choice at the time, more a decision forced onto me by necessity. I needed to defend myself from frequent attacks and retreated just out of sight. Being reclusive has its good and bad points, just as extroversion does. As I have said, I tend to notice those around me a lot, and being an observer can teach you a lot about the world. I've come to believe now that the same people who caused my introversion in the first place are present in near every situation. I hate and distrust very nearly every person I have ever met, not to the point where it interferes with my own life, but still enough for me to stay away from others. I approach friendships with apathy rather than enthusiasm, because I have come to realise that very few things will last forever, friends will come and go, and nobody can be relied upon other than one's self. Living in the shadows of others, I've become self sufficient. I've learned as much as I need to survive, and at all costs I avoid enlisting the help of others. But there are things happening in my head that I can't explain, and that I've been avoiding thinking about for a while now. It's hard for me to put into words, and harder again to actually allow those words to escape the confines of my mind. It's almost as if something has destroyed a great deal of what used to be an over-active emotional mess in my brain, and I'm pretty sure I destroyed it myself. An unfortunate consequence of me becoming a stable person. I used to feel so much emotion that it nearly destroyed me. Now it seems that I struggle to find any scraps of emotion left, just to try to actually interact on a human level, on a personal level. I find myself physically exhausted as a result. I personally can see immense benefits from living a life with low emotional interference. Emotions always seem to get in the way of reason, they slow decision making processes, cause conflicts, and delay logical actions. I personally can see that the best way to a functional world is to set emotion aside in favour of good reason and logic. But that doesn't mean that I don't want to be able to comfort an old friend in a time of need, or mourn after a significant loss. Lately I just feel so heartless. I want to be a good friend to the few who have actually stuck by me through the past few years, but it just seems that I'm going off in a completely different direction, and I don't know for sure where it will take me.

But as I always do, I'll go with the flow, take each day as it comes, make few plans and expect none of them to work out. I've been avoiding the issue and probably will continue to do so because it hasn't had too much of a negative impact so far. It may do in the very near future, but we'll see.