63: steps towards despair: a burden to practically everyone I've ever met

I remember as a kid, looking out my bedroom window at a few other kids playing in the street. One of them was overweight and I yelled something like, "hey, fat pig" at him.

For no reason.

I remember saying "hey stupid" to a new kid in school, because he was, you know, the new kid. I remember mocking my classmates for their spelling errors or for getting questions wrong. I remember contradicting and interrupting my teachers, to the extent where I probably still hold some sort of record at my old school for number of times I got kicked out of class.

For a while I went through a lying phase. This was mostly in fifth grade. Not only would I lie in order to worm my way around getting caught (for homework I hadn't done, for example), but I had a bad case of one-upmanship whenever someone told a good story or joke. I made up some adventure of my own, unverifiable to anyone in the room.

I'm far less comfortable with lying today, but my one-upmanship remains, in some more socially acceptable forms. It isn't necessarily even one-upmanship -- my stories are not always as good or as exciting as the ones the other people tell -- but it's a form of self-validation. "Well, I guess that was a pretty good story, but I'm here too, I have stories too." Sometimes I even feel that I can only move a conversation along by contributing a similar experience of my own to it, instead of continuing talking about the other's experience. This may seem like a minor thing, but it is symptomatic of my entire life: even in my apparent attempts to connect with others, to help someone else along, it is really all about me. I live by theft.

I remember how a friend and I would wrestle with the other kids living in his building. It wasn't exactly brawling, but it was more serious than play-fighting. Once I groped a girl inappropriately during such a fight (she was just reaching adolescence). What is incredible to me in retrospect is how naive I was about it. There was no thought of getting a cheap thrill in a sexual way out of this; I simply considered it a valid move in a semi-serious skirmish with a girl.

But her reaction, the look on her face and the sound that she made, has haunted me all these years.

What is the use of my life? Some guy out there might have an eating disorder because of the way people called him names when he was a chubby kid. God only knows what psychological disorders some girl is carrying around from a grope in a hallway fight. Who knows how many of the cruelties on my part have seriously injured others. And what have I done in return? Have I done anything good of which one can say, "well, of course you'll do some damage along the way, but you're doing something good as well"?

Nothing comes to mind. It seems like so many empty words. Even the better things I have done have been like the stories I tell -- a form of self-validation. Whose life is enriched because of me? Where have I even neutralized the damage I have done? I can't even apologize to most of the people I've hurt, because I can't track them down anymore.

Part of being a Christian means that you can't drag this stuff around with you all your life; you must accept God's forgiveness for it and move on. But far from uplifting me, this discourages me even more. For one thing, even in my more willing moments I can't surrender it, and so I continue to feel like a failure for carrying this around with me anyway. For another, it often seems like such a scumbag's way out;I'd like to pay back the damage somehow.

But of course I can't. Even my most determined efforts to do some good in order to compensate for the bad I do have only resulted in more bad.

And that, too, is a miserable realization. Where else can all this lead but to despair? What conclusion can possibly follow other than the conclusion that the world would be better off if I hadn't been born?