[Warning: whining philosophical BS ahead]

 What can I even say?  I don't even know where to begin.  I feel as though some part of me is dying, withering away.  I feel I desperately need spirituality once again.  I need God in my life again.  Not that He hasn't always been there, just that I haven't been paying attention.  The comfort of being surrounded by others of the same faith.  The joy and exultation of praise in one voice.  Why can I not find the courage or the strength to feed even my own, starving soul?

I often fear that I will be alone forever.  Not alone in a complete way; I know that God is always there.  But alone in that I will never have another human companion to share those parts of me that cannot be shared with any other.  In short, I may never know what it is to have someone to love.  A lover.  A boyfriend, a soulmate...whatever you choose to call it.  I sometimes fear I will always be alone, doomed by my own solitary nature.  I'm not sure if people percieve me as shy or not, or even if I always percieve myself as shy, but I think I have always been shy, and everything I am now I have learned to be.  I have taught myself not to fear, to speak my mind with confidence even when I'm terrified to do so.  Sometimes I still can't bring myself to do it.  Sometimes when I do, I blunder and say or do the wrong thing and wish over and over that I hadn't.  Still, am I really so different from everyone else?  What is it that lets them forge on ahead of me, leaving me behind and wondering where I went wrong?  I feel like an incompetent child, just like when I was little and the other kids could climb the tree when I didn't even have the strength or size to pull myself up onto the lowest branch. 

Am I just too much of an idealist?  Is it too much, because I won't date just anyone?  Because I'm too terrified to date just anyone?  Because the only people in my life I might have wanted to date are out of it now, having never known the difference as far as I was concerned, and who were probably wholly unavailable to me anyway?  Perhaps it is as a friend of mine said, and I was only ever attracted to them in the first place because subconciously I knew that I would never be able to have a practical relationship with them.  Perhaps that is the truth.  But another part of me says that it might have been possible, if I had been braver, if I'd had the heart to say something.  At least if I'd been shot down, I wouldn't have to wonder, but I feel that, confronted with the situation again, I would probably succumb to the same weakness.

Ah well, in the next moment I think that none of it matters.  Perhaps it doesn't.  Perhaps I'm past the point now where anyone would even want to be with me at all.  It isn't as if I was ever or am attractive.  It's true, I can't be bothered with fixing my appearance.  As it is, I have oily skin, my hair is never neatly cut or trimmed or done, I almost never wear makeup, I have crooked teeth and a crooked nose and, the worst societal damnation of all, I'm hairier than the average caucasian female.  I'd probably have to wax and shave every single part of my entire body to fit the media-presented ideal everyone is so used to seeing plastered all over everything.  If I have to be alone forever in order to be myself is it really too high a price to pay?