It surrounds and envelops at the most unexpected times. You'd expect it to hit when you're alone and reminiscent and bored--and it does--but its most acutely felt moments is just one breath away from the warmth of camaraderie.

That's what's so strange. 

I am an unrepentant extrovert. Never am I happier and more energized than when I'm with friends and family. Give me the warmth and glow of an evening among comrades and I can exist nearly indefinitely. But every once in a while, in the midst of the festivities, my mind will retreat and force shut the emotion of connection. It literally feels like I'm being held at arms length from others by my own mind. The sweetness of the moment turns suddenly tasteless and my ability to continue to connect feels robotic and otherly--like I'm putting on an act. But I do continue, it would be wrong not to. I'm not the sort of person to leave a group without pretext, particularly if everyone knows I am the socialite that I am ninety percent of the time.

It comes in waves and periods. I don't always get hit with it, and I will often go for months without feeling it, but then it will hit, and when it does it hits often for a period of time. It feels to me like the air is sucked out of the room, like my genuineness has been cut off and smothered, and I get a mild version of the feeling of churning in the gut that accompanies moments of great stress, nerves, and guilt.
Insincere. Like I am getting away with telling a lie, but not one that even in the moment I'm proud of and getting a high from--one of those lies you almost have to force yourself to say because the truth is something to ghastly to admit even to yourself.

The best way I can describe the feeling I have towards myself in those moments is this: Self loathing. I absolutely hate myself, and I don't really know why. I mean, in an intellectual way, I know plenty of things I dislike about myself, but this is even different. I just feel in those moments an absolute gut-rot revulsion towards anything I say or do, go over and over in my head everything I did wrong in each conversation and interaction and mentally brutalize myself for them. In these moments I am an absolute fraud, and I chastise myself for presenting myself in the way I want to be seen, and I even in some way feel slightly mad at everyone else in that moment for believing me.

We all have our own small tendencies towards narcissism, and I do believe I am far from a narcissist in the clinical sense, but I have always had this driving need to be liked by everyone, and I can remember even when I was young, I would spend weeks on end pouring over individual words I had said to people that I wanted to like me, and kicking myself for not coming up with something that would pass me off as "cooler" in the moment. The irony is that when these moments strike today, my mind jumps to those exact memories from years ago when I said or did something stupid, and it screams at me: "See! You haven't even outgrown your ten-year-old self's immature inability to be yourself! What an asshole. How have you managed to con any of these people into being friends with you?"

Yet it is not from a facade of personality that I put up, per-se. I have never consciously acted different from my "normal" personality around different groups of people, rather I have always very consciously tried to be likeable and instead of creating a persona to "put on" I have kept the things that people seem to like and dropped the things that people didn't.
I remember one time when I was about 12 or 13, another kid I had just met criticized the way I laughed (I would sort of breathe in and out through my teeth, making a light sheh-sheh sort of sound) with a mild sense of enjoyable cruelty, as adolescent boys often do. It wasn't something I had been consciously aware of (who thinks about the way they sound when they laugh?), but this cruel jab left me mortified. When I got home I spent hours in front of a mirror reteaching myself to laugh. I never laughed that way again.
So it's not like I'm pretending to be someone different and more likeable when I'm around people, it's more that I've molded my personality based on interactions to be someone that I think is likeable, it actually IS my personality, it's just been molded somewhat consciously. The problem is I can never get away from this little niggling feeling that something about that is fraudulent, and in these moments of unwarranted self-loathing, I drown in it.

I have never been one to shy away from the spotlight though. I love being the center of attention, to be the wittiest, smartest, cleverest person in the room, and put me on stage and that just feeds my ego even further. I need validation, however. After a strategy game or rpg session, I want to pick apart and discuss what everyone thought and liked and disliked and whether they got this bit or that bit that I was trying to do and wasn't I clever when. . . And then afterwards I kick myself for being a pig and stealing all of the attention and talking to much and making an ass of myself.

I show off and then require validation, before immediately punishing myself for being so needy and being a show-off in the first place.

The sickening part of this whole thing is that, while writing all of this out is really quite therapeutic and helps me organize this feeling I've been dealing with, there is a real part of me that wants you all to read this and validate me and say that, either "It's alright, everyone is like this," or "You're special." I'm even getting a cheap thrill about confessing this. I'll probably kick myself for this in about ten minutes anyway. . .

In any case, if you've been around me recently, and I seem to suddenly disconnect, this is why. I don't dislike any of you at all. I just. . . am not feeling it at that moment for whatever reason. And I'm probably even mad at myself for it. Just know that I still like you and enjoy your company.

What it really comes down to is that I just love myself too much, which means that I also hate myself. At the same time.

I don't know if I'll write more on here. Goodness knows its been years as it is.... but there is more to be said related to this. One topic that I probably should talk about is how I use self-deprecating humor to make myself more likeable (spoiler, I both do and don't believe the thing that I joke about myself in that moment). But I'll leave that for another time. I've procrastinated today's RPG session long enough . . . .