From Newsgroup: alt.support.depression

I am amending this post (22 years later!) with the following new
information.

1. I was the author of this post, which I wrote under the name
"street light boy."

2. The reference to the /street light/ was in regard to a dream I
had at the age of two or three. There were two street lights
across from where I lived. In this dream, I discovered one of
them standing in my living room cradling me side-to-side. I
somehow found that sexually arousing, and I told my mother that
the next time I had such a dream, I was going to "let it" (that
is, permit the street light to handle me in such a sexually
arousing fashion). I indeed had another dream in which the street
light appeared in my living room, and it picked me up and handled
me in a similarly-arousing "lowering gesture."

3. It turns out I do not have an "estrogen problem." Recent lab
results show that I have (1) low testosterone, (2)
hyperprolactinemia, and (3) abnormally high creatine kinase.
Those are known symptoms of Hashimoto's thyroiditis, with which I
was diagnosed before I wrote the original post below.
Hyperprolactinemia may have been the cause of my sensation of
having "breasts" or "nipples," which I wrongly attributed to
estrogen. Further, the creatine kinase result suggests I have
hypothyroid myopathy. One symptom of hypothyroid myopathy is
proximal muscle weakness and pseudohypertrophy. Proximal muscles
include the shoulders, biceps, thighs, and glutes.
Pseudohypertrophy may be the reason that, as a teenager, I
acquired what I described in the original post as a "huge ass."

4. I do not know whether I had leaky gut syndrome /since I was a
baby/. There was some speculation within the autism support
community that I had it as a teenager.

5. While as a baby I did not necessarily have leaky gut syndrome
or an estrogen problem, I /did/ have a precocious sexuality.
Some evidence for this is documented in reports by Advent Day
School that, as a preschooler, I stated I did not want my teacher
to "change my diapers" (though this was in relation to a
/personal fetish/, and I have no memory of that actually
occurring).

6. I no longer believe in the /Christian/ god. In my view, the
word "god" has so many definitions and varying concepts that it
is hard to define what it means to believe in one.

Sometime around 2019, Google Groups banned the /entire newsgroup/ alt.support.depression, leaving in its place the group "alt
support.depression" (with a space between "alt" and "support").
My post as the "street light boy," together with later posts I
wrote under the name MikeH106, were made inaccessible.

The date Google Groups shut down active participation was Febuary
22. That was also the day I posted an apology to
alt.games.everquest for some things I wrote under the name
"Sephiroth416214," an apology in which I declared I liked a
certain melody from Final Fantasy 7. February 22 is /also/ the
day that I (exactly three years later) dreamed of hearing a group
of bullies sing "nobody loves you" to the tune of "We Are the
Champions." I find this connection of dates to be curious --
though I have not determined whether it was mere coincidence or
had an explainable cause.

On 2004-09-01, The Street Light <street_light_boy@hotmail.com> wrote:

Ok, I do not mean to frighten anyone with this post. I am just
noticing something about the path my life has been taking, and
when I look at it all on paper it looks like God is punishing
me for something I did when I was really young. And now I have
what other people classify as profound depression with
delusional thoughts.

First of all, let me talk about myself. Since I was a baby I
have had something called Leaky Gut Syndrome. It is when you
have little holes in your intestinal wall that pieces of food
can leak through and make you tired. Actually, some proteins
break down into molecules that act like MORPHINE, and these are
called opioids. They can cause a person to appear "rude" and
lack social skills. (I was once diagnosed with Asperger's
Syndrome and then, when I became depressed, with Schizoid
Personality Disorder.) Actually I am even worse than that: I
have an estrogen problem in addition to these opioids which has
made me sexually submissive since I was a baby.

Now before I continue I want to discuss something called the
"social ladder." Your position on the ladder is defined by how
dominant you are over other people. If you are a boss, you can
fire anyone you want. Similarly, if you're the school bully you
can beat up anyone you want, and people have to do what you
say. Perhaps even more dominant are those that, unlike bullies,
don't use brute force to get their way, but instead master the
entire social code so that they will be liked by everyone.
Studies have shown that your rank on the social ladder is
strongly correlated with your levels of a hormone called
testosterone. That is what makes nerds nerds. They don't have
high testosterone. At the "lowest" point on the social ladder,
you don't have any testosterone, which I guess would cause
growth problems.

Obviously, estrogen is the OPPOSITE of testosterone. It makes
you feel like instead of needing to be in control of things,
you want things to be a certain way so you can be happy. Well,
that is my conjecture of how it works anyway from trying to
analyze what estrogen does to my own brain. In a sense, then,
it's possible to be negative on the social ladder if you're a
man (a "nerd", actually) with a severe estrogen problem.

I will give a brief account of my life and the changes I went
through that made me more depressed. At preschool I guess I was
the happiest kid in the world, horny all the time because of my
estrogen problem, I always had these sexy dreams and every
manmade object looked sexy. I thought I was going to heaven
even though I did nothing while the whole world took care of
me. This was such a wonderful state of bliss that I decided to
separate myself from the rest of my classmates and be "the
one". I can't define what it means to be "the one", but it
probably has to do with estrogen. It felt like I was being
sucked down into my legs, so that I could only watch people
talk. That got VERY boring very fast, but for some reason I did
not stop wanting to be "the one".

Anyway, I got teased ALL THE WAY through school because of
this. Picture the NERDIEST boy you can possibly imagine acting
like a selfish girl and trying to get attention. It was worse
in middle school, when I got introduced to two things: sex, and
getting beat up. I wanted "sex" (actually I was confused about
what it was) but knew that I could not get any because I got
beat up by everyone. Actually I have NEVER won a fight. And I
noticed that while I could be depressed about one thing
(getting beat up) sometimes, and another thing (not getting
sex) at other times, I could not willingly think about both at
once -- that would have been too depressing.

Anyway, at one point my solution was to become a "genius" so
that I could get more attention. So I taught myself relativity
when I was 12 and calculus when I was 13. I was extremely proud
of these accomplishments and my personality took a very
ARROGANT turn. Suddenly I was smart, and everyone else, all
these people who beat me up, were stupid. I leeched off the
attention of others who talked about how smart I was. And then
I started masturbating. To SUBMISSIVE fantasies. Fantasies of
people doing things to you to make you feel really small and
horny. You would think I should know better, only an idiot
would believe sex is supposed to make men feel smaller, but
nobody ever talked about sexual emotion. There was just this
thing called "sex" that people said they liked. Anyway I kept
masturbating to submissive fantasies for six years, getting
more and more miserable trying to avoid "getting beat up, no
sex" thougts, totally oblivious to how sick and perverted the
fantasies were.

I have never had a date once in my life, but in high school I
fell in love with a girl (romantically, from phenylethylamine)
and I realized just how happy I could possibly be. Love was the
BIGGEST THRILL I've ever felt, better than any orgasm. And I
wondered, what does an orgasm feel like when you're in love.
That question burned in my mind. Sadly, I was crushed a year
later when I learned she had a boyfriend. And I knew somehow,
because of my personality, that that was my only chance. It
made me feel so terrible that now I had another "bad thought":
Love. And I REFUSED to think about getting beat up, love, and
sex all at once. After the girl I liked left my high school I
felt like I was heading for SEVERE depression, something worse
and more "life-long" than the heartbreak I felt. I locked
myself away from society, living in my own apartment and not
socializing with ANYONE, except over the internet, for three
years. (That is what gave me Schizoid Personality Disorder.)

I wanted to hide how much of a nerd I was from other people,
how ugly my face looked from the estrogen caused by the
masturbation. Like if I got teased too much, it would remind me
of the love and sex I would never get. And I was so miserable
about it that I was masturbating to cartoon characters, so that
I wouldn't have to worry about whether they liked me or hated
me. (I found out the hard way that if you do that too much, you
even start thinking about THAT.) My most depressing thought was
"I'll always be a virgin". At the age of 20, I realized I
wasn't growing.

I now realize that my body feels VERY different because of my
six-year-long masturbation episode. My legs feel HUGE, fat, and
helpless, and my chest feels scrawny. My ass is huge. My face
is disgusting and it looks like it should belong to the lower
part of my body. I am forced to walk funny, yanking my legs
forward with each step. But at age 20 I didn't care, I had
already discovered something else: drugs. They were the one
thing I felt I could thank God for. I could mimic the same
bliss I would feel during a love orgasm, by taking the right
drugs in combination. Finally I took LSD and said, This is the
happiest day of my life. It made me realize that even if we
never do find a boyfriend or girlfriend, we should all enjoy
what I consider to be God's greatest gift to mankind: the order
and symmetry of the world. And that's when, after 8 years of
being an atheist, I believed in God again.

Fortunately, my desire to be a "genius" -- which has survived
past my need for attention over it -- led me to cut back on the
hard drugs. If I did a drug, I told myself, it would be for an
INTELLECTUAL purpose, it would be to discover how a part of my
brain works, not for pleasure. And I decided to live the rest
of my life with no friends, no girlfriend, ever. I would just
enjoy the order and symmetry of the world.

But now there is a problem. I have had the most MISERABLE
possible social life until now (a lone nerd in an apartment,
masturbating to submissive fantasies with a pretend girlfriend
I was actually "in love" with), and then I was doing drugs. I
stopped eating the foods that gave me opioids. I should at
least be going through phenylethylamine withdrawal (heartbreak)
because of my "girlfriend" if nothing else.

Well one thing I have noticed is that although love and sex
don't wrack my emotions as they used to (I already experienced
the ultimate bliss with LSD), my thoughts about the future are
very depressing. I am convinced that because of the course of
development my body has taken, and because of my depressing
love life, I am going to die early. My delusions are now that
God is angry at me for submitting to pleasure and that I am
going to hell. And get this: most of my day now consists of
THEORIZING ABOUT WHAT HELL IS LIKE. I could tell you my current
theory of hell right now, it's agonizing, but I don't want to
make this post any longer, and besides, it paints a very
frightening picture. (Actually I will say one thing, just to
give you an idea of how bad it is: if you get "used" to the
pain, Satan gives you an orgasm and when it's over hell becomes
10 times worse.) Now I just want to live as long as possible
and enjoy God's creation before an eternity of torment in hell,
or possibly (POSSIBLY, if I manage to change myself in a LOT of
ways) go to heaven.

I need to do something. Medications don't seem to have any
effect on my depression. They only change my perception of the
order and symmetry around me (serotonin from Prozac for example
just makes my eyes pick out the friendliest-looking features of
objects). I am convinced that to live, I need to do a lot of
things, including stand up every day and eat a very specific
diet.

Do I stand a chance at living, if I eat LOTS and do like 300
pushups every day? Or do I need friends? I hope to get advice
from somebody else with Schizoid Personality Disorder. How
bored with life are you? Do you feel the way I do? My new hell
thought (babies dying early from not getting enough love) is
scaring me into thinking I need friends.

-- Scott Hoge
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