What Am I Looking For?

What am I looking for?  If you know, please tell me.

Am I looking for health that enables a normal sleep schedule and the ability to be with people when they want, not just when I'm available?  Am I looking for enough concentration to be lucid most of the day, rather than hiding from people because I get strangely fatalistic missing even a couple hours of sleep, and because I'm sneezy from being underslept the first couple hours of most days?  Those things definitely would be nice, but I've managed to build a life around them, making friends in other countries and resulting in having friends who are awake whenever I'm awake.

Am I looking for more sex?  Quite possibly.  But when you spend ages 15-25 assuming you were a child molester based on something your parent said about you, it's difficult to feel the confidence to ask.  Rejection for any reason feels like a confirmation that I'm the creepy person I believed I was all those years, so I don't venture anything.  And I don't gain anything either.

Am I looking for a body I would be happy with?  Maybe, but these other issues showed up when I was lighter.

Am I looking for people in general liking me?  Maybe, but I already have several amazing friends.

Am I looking for specific people liking me?  That seems to be an issue.  There are some people who seem "major league" in their circles, and everybody seems to love them, and I want to be in on that.

Am I looking for approval?  It seems so, but that might be a cover for not having enough internal approval.  Whenever a writer talks about privilege, it tends to hurt because the topic frequently goes to excess and stereotyping.  In ranting moments, those articles tend to tell white Christian males like me that whatever you do isn't due to your effort, but the efforts of others who gamed the system for you.  And since privilege can't be fully quantified, it feels like a taint on whatever I do, an asterisk on anything I accomplish.  So I don't talk publicly about when I get promoted or when I win something or what I get for birthdays or Christmas, because no matter what it is there's that risk that somebody will say "yeah, you only got that because of your privilege."  It's impossible to disprove something like that, so it hovers.  I don't find minefields relaxing.  All this means that other people tweet things about something happy that occurred to them and they get congratulated, while I'm scared to talk about anything happy that occurs to me because shouty writers and people who publicize their opinions way too much might take those happy things from me with a word.

Am I looking for belonging and acceptance?  Probably.  But if it's that simple, why does it feel so complex, and why, given my amazing friends, do I feel like I don't have it?  Why do I feel perpetually locked out of what the cool kids are doing?  Am I still trying to answer those kids from 1990-97 who would tell me "You don't go to real school" because I was homeschooled?  I know they still sting me even as they've definitely forgotten me.  I try to be a real lawyer, a real musician, and a real writer, whatever those mean, and having gone to a Tier 1 law school and being published on major web sites makes me feel, however briefly, like I was real.  I've done a lot of stuff in part because my emotions want to disprove some 8-year-olds.  And saying that makes me feel awful in several ways.

I suspect a lot of what I'm looking for is an internal sense that I did something real and permanent, something whose praise is objectively deserved, something nobody can tear down for being privileged or tainted just because I did it.  Because of those kids saying I didn't go to real school, and because of the child molester accusation, I've felt an asterisk on my head most of my life.  I'm perpetually different, niche, outside.  I rarely feel fully accepted in a group and have no way to judge whether I am.  It's likely that I am accepted but can't feel it, but maybe it's egotistical to assume I am accepted.

This is not me whinging about my life; if it were, I wouldn't publish it for fear of people saying I'm privileged, so how dare I voice concerns.  Day to day, my life is pretty awesome.  But I don't know what I'm looking for in these moments of melancholy.  I don't know what's missing.  I can say that I want to find X, but since I don't know what X looks like, I wouldn't find it even if I saw it.

I'm desperate to know what I'm looking for.  Maybe it's obvious to you from knowing me; if so, tell me.  I can't feel more lost than this, so anything helps.