i struggle to cope with the fact that i'm an adult, when physically and emotionally i still feel like a boy, like i stopped growing before everyone else or missed some critical development milestone. not only am i talentless, i am emotionally fragile, awkward, and meek. my weakness extends to my physical body as well. i'm 22 with the body of a teenage boy. narrow shoulders, wide hips, short, etc. it should come as no surprise that i am a khhv too, and i don't even want to have sex because i don't feel "ready", because that 'something' is missing that prevents my real life from starting. there's so much more i 'need' to do that i should've done years ago that i don't have time to do so it can never be done so i can never start unless i put my entire life on pause, but my body grows older and my hairline recedes year after year. what the heck happened?!

it used to be that i felt more content because there was this idea of a person that i would grow into far in the future, one who would be successful, but now the breakout successes are my age, and it turns out they were far better than me even in adolescence. everybody was doing SOMETHING but me, and i was too oblivious or socially isolated to realize it, either because i was waiting around to try to grow into a better person, or i was left waiting to pass the threshold everybody else naturally overcame, or i never had the drive or talent in the first place and never would have. as i said, i was socially isolated so the only people i "knew" were the heroes i looked up to, these distant adults who 'did something' because they were adults. this might have left me with unrealistic expectations for how successful i could be, and i cannot let go of that because my life is still missing that 'something' that reduces me to a boy among men and women

so now it feels like my entire existence has been made deficient and fraudulent, and what i feel and see are not as 'real' as i once thought they were