Most of the time it doesn't arise. I've constructed a life where it doesn't need to. I'm fine on my own, I don't require much, and the people around me are pleasant enough at the depth I keep them.
Then occasionally someone comes along who seems capable of it.
Not capable of liking me — plenty of people manage that.
Capable of understanding. Of seeing the things I see. Of caring about what I care about, in the way I care about it.
And underneath that, though I'd never say it out loud: capable of being the person who could make me feel like I matter.
And that's where it starts.
Because it's never straightforward. It's never someone arriving and saying: yes, I see you, you matter to me, here's the thing you've been pretending not to need.
It's ambiguous. It's a good conversation followed by three flat days. It's warmth that arrives without warning and leaves the same way.
So I try to work it out.
And this is where the over thinking triggers.
The observation.
The analysis.
I start reading everything — every conversation, every glance, every joke, every comment.
Not casually. Forensically. I replay things on the walk home, as I try to get to sleep. I analyse the choice of words, the tone, the expression, the pauses.
I try and figure out what it would mean to the average person. What are all the possible meanings of that sentence?
When an unpopular colleague left, I came up with the ultimate phrase for his leaving card: “I hope you get everything you deserve.” A line carefully crafted to have multiple meanings.
And every conversation, shared moment, glimpse of anything, all seems to have been crafted to mean everything and nothing all at once.
I read the gaps too. What they didn't say. What they said and then withdrew in the same breath. The thing offered and immediately qualified. The correction to a statement nobody had questioned.
None of it gives me an answer.
I pull on everything I've got. The years of reading people, of seeing past what someone is saying to the meaning behind it. The instinct that has mostly made people boring and predictable.
It doesn't matter how carefully I look, how many times I turn it over, how good I am at reading people. The information simply isn't in there. It's in them, and I can't get at it.
But knowing that doesn't stop me looking. I just look harder.
The obvious solution is to ask.
But I can't.
Not because I haven't thought of it. I've thought of nothing else. I've drafted it, rehearsed it, imagined the room. But asking requires believing I have some standing to ask, and I don't have that. I don't believe I matter.
That's the foundation everything else is built on. So why would I matter to this person? What would make them the exception? The question answers itself before I've finished forming it.
And then it gets worse, because I start to wonder whether they have any idea this is happening at all. Whether the thing I've been reading forensically for months has registered with them as anything more than someone who talks a lot. Whether I'm just some weird over-sharer they're being polite to.
Every version ends with me having made a fool of myself, because that's the only ending I know how to generate.
And then there's the argument that finishes it off.
If you have to ask to matter to someone, is it even possible?
Because I had to ask. Which means it wasn't offered. Which means I prompted it. Which means I'd spend the rest of it wondering whether they meant it, or whether they were just being kind to someone who'd made it very difficult to say no.
It's a good argument. It's airtight. It closes the last available door.
It's also, almost certainly, bollocks.
Because people ask each other things all the time. They say I need to know where I stand, and the other person tells them, and it counts. That's most of how anyone ever finds out anything. The idea that it only counts if it arrives unprompted isn't a principle — it's a rule I invented, and I invented it because it means I never have to risk the asking.
Knowing that doesn't help. I still can't ask. But I should be honest that the reason isn't the philosophy. The philosophy is just the most flattering way of describing the fear.
And underneath all of it, the thing I resent most: I need someone.
I hate that. I've spent years building a life where that isn't true. Not needing people was the entire architecture. It was the thing that made me okay — self-sufficient, unbothered, fine alone, capable of eating out on my own and going to the cinema on my own, all things that other people seem to struggle with.
I cultivated this life where I was the only important person.
And now I've discovered it was contingent. It held because nobody had ever got close enough to test it. One person arrives who might actually be able to see me, and the whole structure turns out to be a story I was telling myself.
I can't go back either. Once you know you need people — once you know there's a version of being alive where you're not weird and not alone and maybe just okay — you can't unknow it. You can't rebuild the fortress on a foundation you've now seen through. You just have to live in it knowing it's made of paper.
And when the analysis runs out — when I've squeezed every reading out of every sentence and there's genuinely nothing left to interpret — I don't stop. I just switch modes.
I fill the gap with a fantasy.
Some version where it works out. Where the thing is said and received well. Where they turn out to have felt it too. Small domestic scenes I have no business imagining. A future assembled from nothing, in high resolution.
It's the only part of the cycle that offers any relief, and it's the part that does the most damage, because it raises the stakes on something that hasn't happened and might never. I'm not just hoping they care. I'm now grieving a specific life I invented on a bus.
And then I catch myself doing it.
And the question arrives that undoes everything before it: if I can build a whole future out of nothing, what else have I built?
Because the analysis and the fantasy aren't separate activities. They're the same faculty pointed in two directions. The thing that reads a pause and finds meaning in it is the thing that assembles the flat, the mornings, the version where it works out. One of those is obviously invention. So what makes me so sure the other one isn't?
I can't check. That's the problem. The instrument I'd use to test the reading is the instrument that wants the reading to be true. I'm not a neutral observer of this. I'm the least neutral person available. Every piece of evidence I've gathered was gathered by someone who needed it to say a particular thing, and I have no way of knowing how much that skewed the result.
And I'm good at this. That's not a boast, it's the trap. The better you are at finding meaning in what people say, the better you are at manufacturing it. The skill and the delusion use exactly the same muscle.
So maybe I've built an entire person out of a handful of real conversations and some very generous interpretation, and projected the rest onto someone who's just there. An imaginary friend with a real face.
I can't rule it out. Ruling it out would require the one thing I can't get.
Then something ambiguous happens and the whole thing starts again.
So I wait for it to be offered freely, by someone who has no idea they're being auditioned.
And I watch. And I analyse. And I build the case and dismantle it. And I invent the future I'm not going to get.