Cha P’s Reviews > No Longer Human > Status Update

People don’t know each other at all,
really. It’s possible to have a completely mistaken view of someone,
consider him your best friend, and even, when he dies, deliver a tearful
eulogy, all without ever having known who he truly was.

I was afraid even of God, unable to believe in divine love, able only to believe in divine punishment. Faith. To me, that meant simply facing God’s judgment seat with head bowed, prepared to accept his chastisement. I could believe in hell, but not in the existence of heaven.

I have a suffocating dread of sudden changes, the sort that spoil the atmosphere. I am so desperate to please that more often than not I add a word of embellishment, however warped, feeble or stupid it may be, and even knowing that doing so will work against me in the long run.

“When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window"

people around me shut down my ability to trust anyone. Even my parents sometimes acted in
ways I found hard to understand. And I think the loneliness I embraced, unable to confide in anyone, gave off a scent that women picked up instinctively, and this was one reason why in later years I was taken advantage of in so many ways.

Whenever someone asked me what I wanted, my mind went blank. I would have the distinct thought that it didn’t matter, that nothing would make me happy anyway. But when I received something not to my liking, I was incapable of rejecting it. I couldn’t come out and say I didn’t like it. Things I liked, I tasted with bitter fear, as if I were a thief, and then endured nameless dread.

how do sufferers manage to carry on without killing
themselves or going mad, stay interested in politics, resolutely continue the
struggle to live and never give into despair? Can their suffering be genuine?

I had an uneasy sense that my concept of happiness was utterly different from the one everyone else shared. Have I ever known happiness? All my life people have been telling me how fortunate I am, but
I have always, always felt that I was going through the torments of hell and that those who called me fortunate were infinitely better off.

People work for a living because they have to feed themselves, or else they’ll die: nothing was so
impenetrable and obscure to me, so starkly threatening, as those words.