For me, privately chatting with people lets me feel closer to them. I struggle holding on to real relationships, so I make a lot of my friends online. One thing I've noticed about real friendships is there always seems to be a catch.

I had a fiction story that I found inspiration for recently that closely resembled things in your life. Out of respect for you, it has been deleted.

There was no need, really. I am here to share and help others, there is no other motivation for me. Can I ask why you struggle with offline relationships? It is only very recently - last few months or so that I have been exposed to 'online' friendships and I do understand how much easier it is, but here too, you get different types of people with different motives?

That question kind of comes with a life story.

I'm sure you understand, but growing up we have two sides of us. We have the person the world sees and the person we are to ourself. The person I was to the world was an outgoing guy who only knew how to joke. Obnoxious and unrelenting.

Deep down, I was and in some way still am a person who's very conflicted. I hate myself and I once hated everyone around me. Bad things are always going on around us and nobody pays any mind to it. Whether it was me being bullied down to others being bullied, I hated them all. I was sociopathic in ways and couldn't see the light in people.

Even though I acted crazy and actually played an idiot, I was observant and saw everything around me. I see people for who they are and have some sort of . . . gift, you could say. I can look in a persons eyes, their body language, facial expressions, the way they act; and see who they really are.

I grew up in a bad area, so I never saw anything good. But I was there to help people. I was a freshman in high school the first time I fell in love. It was an ex girlfriends best friend. Her and I quickly became friends and I would help her deal with anything she needed. She was the first person I was ever real with.

We shared the same feelings for one another, but it would never have worked. I was an ex to her friend who had used me. We only dated two weeks.

Well, me her my exes friend were best friends. We knew everything about each other. She had a birthday party and was hung over some guy that was there. This broke me because this was the first person I have ever cared for, including myself. So from that, my world shattered and I became jaded. Of course I dated girls, but none of them shared a connection with me.

There's a lot more.

I get that. I read your first chapter and I left a comment on there. I too have a gift, I can 'analyse' a person in seconds, this of course coming from a lifetime of observation. I went through a lot of shit - sorry I speak frankly - and to this day you could say that I 'hate' men? You talk about the two sides, and yeah, the private side of me wanted to hurt them, and punish myself in the process... You are young though - assuming this is your real photo - and time is a miraculous thing.

When you get to the end of the Memoir you will understand why 'everything' had to happen exactly as it did for me to arrive in this here and this now, in the way I am. Any small deviation and I'd be somewhere else, someone else, and I love the me now, and I love my two beautiful children, so I wouldn't undo any of it if it meant I was someone else, without them... Why I called it STEPS...trouble is we cannot distinguish the importance or direction of each step until we've moved a long way forward and we look back, and we begin to connect these steps? There is something to say in how everyone and everything that enters your life does so for a specific purpose. You may not understand this purpose for a very long time. But then one day you will. The anger and the pain you feel will pass, other people/things will come into play with other purposes. You will emerge at some point and understand everything had to happen, the good and the bad... It's a matter of surviving the bad in the best way you can really...