Seen on a derelict building by the Pier in Swanage, Dorset 

This blog isn't going to be easy reading, so look away now if you don't feel up to me doing some soul-searching. You have been warned.

I tagged this blog a 'journey to discover rediscover myself' and in some ways it has charted some of my explorations into new and uncharted areas of my interests and my progress adjusting to my life living with cancer and diabetes and all the side effects related to them.

Before those illnesses came calling though, I had always perceived myself as 'damaged goods'. I was the girl who sat apart and didn't belong, the loner, the odd one out.

In some ways, my gypsy life style as a child made me that way, we never lived anywhere long enough to make friends properly, I never had a best friend at school. I barely remember the name of anyone I was at school with.  By the time I went to senior school I had been to 13 different schools. By the time I got there I had perfected my silent awkwardness. My home life was very difficult, in today's world I would probably have been taken in to care and protected. Back then you didn't talk about it, and if you did people would pretend it wasn't happening.  Even the Police didn't want to know 'it was a domestic issue'.

All these things contributed to me finding it very hard to connect with other people, despite my huge desire to do so. Friends I made soon became reluctant friends because they didn't want to visit my house, or come round to play. Soon, their parents stopped asking me round there too. It was awkward talking to a child with a black eye I think across the tea-table. Later I got sent home from  my Saturday job working on Woolies' deli  for the same thing - 'its putting the customers off the meat'.

These incidents shape you, they colour your outlook on life, they fill you with self loathing, and guilt. They make you a difficult person to be around. The more alone and isolated you become, the more it reinforces your own view of yourself. 'Of course no one likes you, even your parents hate you' and so it goes on, round and round  in circles of a never-ending merry-go- round with no way off.

Now I am a middle-aged adult, and yes, I am married to the most amazing man, he accepts me exactly as I am - he knows my history, and my short comings, and they are many. But he loves me despite myself. I know I am lucky, but  I still want more.

One thing I wanted to do as part of my journey to rediscover me,  was to learn how to make friends, to be part of a group of people who had fun together. To maybe one day even be someone's best friend. I do try. Maybe I try too hard. Maybe I don't try enough. I just don't know.

I do know I have plenty of acquaintances - but how do you cross the line between friend and acquaintance  How do you build friendships without seeming needy or pushy? Me, I tend to wait for people to come to me because I am terrified of being seen as needy or pushy. But then, you run the risk of being seen as standoffish, aloof, or disinterested.

So often I feel quite alone. Sometimes this is fine, it is a place I am used to, I have been doing it for over 50 years. Other days, today, I feel desolate, the loneliness and the isolation overwhelms me and I feel a desperate need to make a connection with someone who I can call a friend. Today is one of those days.

I don't own a mobile phone - I tell people, 'I hate how they interfere and interrupt life'. Most people will accept this as a reason for not owning one, everyone from time to time gets annoyed at  how they seem to have squirmed into every part of life, the train, on the street, at the dinner table and so on. The truth is this though, I owned one - no one sent me entertaining texts, no one sent texts to me at all. I didn't get phone calls at inconvenient times because no one phoned me. In fact the phone simply served to remind me that despite having all these numbers - no one wanted to talk to me.

I read blogs and Facebook, and see accounts and photographs of people all having great times together, and wishing it was me. But, I am always the stranger looking in from the outside like some modern-day peeping Tom; nose pressed up against the window dreaming what it would be like to belong.

Email is much the same - everyday I log into it, half hoping (if I am in a positive mood). I may find over 100 emails some days, but seldom are any of them from real people. In the main they are just things I have subscribed to, or companies I shop with. Again, I just end up feeling like I am separate from the rest of the World.

I sit and wonder is it just me who feels this way? Does everyone else have the same experience? But I don't have anyone I know well enough that I can just ring up and ask, hey, does it make you feel like this too? I can't 'phone a friend' - there isn't one.

I am 54 soon, and I might as well be 14. I am still filled with all the angst of my teenage years and then some.  I've tried CBT, I have tried therapy. I have tried Prozac, but none of it has helped me do what I most want, and that is to fit in, be accepted, have proper real friends, and well, just do what I see everyone else doing around me.

So there it is, a piece of me layed bare. I don't know how to 'rediscover' this part of me, because it was never there before.