“When I drop the mask, loneliness disappears

Loneliness has motivated all my decisions and shaped who I’ve become, because I was always alone when I was young. I thought the reason no one liked me was because my parents were weird and, clearly, I was a carrier of that weirdness and no one wanted to catch it.

Every day, since childhood, my main motive has been to be accepted, to ensure I wouldn’t have to be alone. I made desperate attempts to glue myself onto gangs or cliques in high school, but was always rejected. It didn’t help that my father nicknamed me ‘sad sack’, which means loser in any language.