My hearing disorder is still a barrier. Yesterday, I finally got my appointment to the nephrologist. He spent the entire time lecturing me on the fact that I was the healthiest person he had ever seen, and that my kidneys would last another 200 years.

Keep in mind that I have Stage 3 kidney disease. Right at the end, he showed me some blood tests. They said that my GFR was 63. That means that I would have moved from Stage 2 to stage 3 in a period of about 6 weeks.

I was unable to respond and point out that my GFR was 52, and if it was 63, how did it get there when CKD was supposed to be incurable.

I told him I was doing acupuncture. He belittled the idea. In all of this, I resorted to compensating behaviour - bird brained, being nice.

I heard what he was saying. I couldn't process it.

I would say that my current level of awareness really came into being around the age of 64 when several things began to occur to me - that people were self-interested, that they had conversations to bond with other people, that they were only interested in hearing nice things about themselves - lots of things. The day I realized that people were driven by self-interested, everything finally fell into place. The sense of confusion that had been with me for a lifetime fell away.

The great tragedy of my life is that now I have no trust in people who aren't intellectually brilliant - probably less than 1% of the population. I have no interest in people who gossip, who groupthink, who need gurus, religion, or anything else. I won't give people a chance in the real world. I am isolated, and it makes me lonely and miserable.

I am working with that now, trying to be accepting of people now. It is difficult for me.