#012022

People talk of ‘social outcasts.’ The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a ‘social outcast’ from the moment I was born. If I ever meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.

I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies in locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed.

[He] at heart did not treat me like a full human being. He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost. His friendship had no other purpose but to utilize me in whichever way would most further his own pleasures […] but I realized after a moment that it was entirely to be expected that [he] should take this view of me; that from long ago, even as a child, I seemed to lack the qualifications of a human being; and that, for all I knew, contempt […] might be entirely merited.

A dark shadow seemed always to be following me.