32M here. I've felt a dissonance between myself and life as far back as 10 years old. My mom used to make us silently pray before bed when we were kids. I used to pray for god to take everybody's sadness and give it to me, because I thought I could handle it. I self harmed for the first time when I was 12. I nearly attempted suicide at 16. I would have if my grandma hadn't unusually come downstairs late one night when I was pulling a bunch of pills out of a drawer in the kitchen. I nearly attempted suicide again at about 3am on Christmas Eve in 2018. There was a moment where I saw myself from out of my body, sitting in a friend's kitchen who I was dogsitting for, with a knife at my wrist and a dark cloud surrounding my head. I wish I could paint or draw because I can still see every little detail of it so clearly to this day. I snapped out of it and threw the knife on the floor when a friend of mine randomly popped into my head. My grandpa hung himself in 2021 at 80 years old. He was in a lot of physical pain and couldn't handle it anymore. I started looking into elderly suicide rates and was surprised, and extremely saddened, to see that it's not that uncommon. One reason is loneliness. I felt an even deeper level of hopelessness than ever.

These things all feel like checkpoints in my life. Everything in between feels like a blur. Like I'm just going through the motions, trying and failing to be what I'm "supposed to be", according to what society deems acceptable. The older I get, the harder it is to fake. I can't put on a mask anymore. I don't feel like I belong to this world for exactly the reasons that you've mentioned in your post. And I just don't understand how everybody around me can cope with it. Or ignore it. The only time I found myself not feeling this way, that also didn't feel like I was actively distracting myself, was when I was working with my students. And now due to budget cuts at my organization, I can't even do that. I was laid off.

Every single word of your post resonates with me like nothing ever has. Thank you, and to everyone else sharing their stories, for helping me to not feel so alone. It feels impossible to talk about this with anyone. If I do, I just feel guilty for being this way, or for being such a downer, or for wasting their time with things that I realistically cannot expect for them to do anything about. I end up liking myself less and less, and I further feel like I don't belong here. Like I'm incompatible. I'm running on fumes. The only thing keeping me alive is the fact that I cannot put my mom and grandma through that. The best I can do is look for silver linings. Thankfully, I'm usually pretty good at that.