I apologize in advance for this less-than-cheerful post.

It is Friday night and I feel awful. This happens more frequently than I’d care to admit.

You might ask me: “You study the cosmos. Doesn’t that make you feel insignificant?”
And I reply, in my probably naive, grasping-for-something-more way: “I feel a drive to be connected with the Universe. By learning about everything knowable, I gain a closeness to the distant, and I become intimate with infinity itself.”
But in truth, when I step back and look at myself, the things that truly make me feel insignificant are the connections I see between people — and how they’re often absent from my life.

Is this loneliness? Is it simple sexual frustration? Is it because I’m afraid to reach out to others? Is it due to a general disillusionment of the motives and mannerisms of my peers? In my hurry to grow up, have I left something within myself unaddressed?

I feel contempt. I feel resentment. Boy, do I feel resentment. Towards a lot of things. I resent having poor, not-well-educated parents, especially when attending a school filled with descendants of wealthy intellectuals. I resent the unstable home life I had to experience throughout my teenage years, and I resent the psychological scarring it leaves with me even once I’m freed of that situation. I resent the sophisticated pre-college educations that my classmates received, when I had to put up with largely mediocre teaching and a brainless mass of “peers”. I resent the fact that I once believed myself to be especially intelligent, only to have that belief crushed out of me last year. Maybe what I resent most of all is the fact that I still feel all this resentment.

Perhaps I don’t deserve the poetic words I said of myself. To “become intimate with infinity itself” — is that really what drives me? I think my greatest fear is that, in truth, I’m only driven by the hope of escaping from my negative emotions.

But… at least there’s hope, isn’t there?