I don’t think I should be proud of this but I have felt this way keenly in my life. I’ve never been able to describe it as well as this. It’s a negative feeling yet its draw is inexorable.
What was truly surprising, even to himself, was that he had started to look for signs of acknowledgment in everyone he met. He was hungry to confirm that people noticed the hum enveloping him, the quiver, the very thing that estranged him from them. However paradoxical, this desire to confirm the distance separating him from others was a form of communion with them.
From Trust by Hernan Diaz