On Loneliness: Conclusion

To read the rest of this series, please click on the loneliness tag at the bottom of the post.

I originally intended to finish this series in January, but I’ve had the hardest time writing the final chapter. Until recently, I wasn’t sure why. I’ve ruminated on a lot of different topics within this series, from my upbringing to American society to social media. Some of them have been very personal. It hasn’t always been easy for me to open up about myself, to admit how I feel. However, I think it’s been worth it. I think it’s helped me. Sometimes I need to see things in print for them to actually sink in.

The reason I’ve had such a difficult time writing this last piece is that I don’t particularly like the conclusion I’ve come to: when it comes to loneliness, the problem is me.

What I’m saying is, my loneliness seems to stem from my own insecurities and self-doubt, not from any outside source. Like most people, I want to be liked. Unlike most people (maybe), I have a hard time putting myself out there. I don’t like opening up to people, letting them see what’s actually going on inside my head. I fear rejection. Even worse, I have this secret fear that no one actually likes me. Believe me, I understand how crazy that is. It makes no logical sense. But it’s there, in the back of my mind, always ready to rear its ugly head at the most inopportune times.

It seems like a pretty safe bet to pinpoint my childhood as the starting point for this particular issue. I was a really lonely kid. I was also really shy. I don’t think I could even order food in a restaurant for myself until I was in college, when I was forced to. If I couldn’t talk to a stranger to order a meal, you can probably imagine how difficult it was for me to try to make friends. I was teased a lot when I was younger. Other kids didn’t like me. Now I can see that they didn’t actually know me. Because I couldn’t open up to them, they saw only the surface: reserved, bookish, tomboyish, nerdy, serious.

As an adult, I understand why kids didn’t like me. I didn’t get it when I was younger. It was hurtful. I felt weird, different. It always seemed like things came way easier for other people than they did for me. I was well into adulthood before I recognized that most of us struggle, that most of us stumble through life just trying to do the best that we can. Fortunately, I learned to accept myself long before that. My high school BFF, Julie, helped a lot with that. I still have so much admiration for her. She really let her freak flag fly and didn’t care what other people thought of her. She was happy. She inspired me to accept myself, but also to see that I was more than what you could see on the surface, that I’m funny, witty, kind, smart, and compassionate.

The problem is that those childhood insecurities never really go away, not unless you work at it. I thought I’d beaten this particular one. Now I can see that I was wrong. I didn’t so much beat it as attempt to drown out that voice. I filled my life with people and activities. In fact, there was a time when I was so busy that I had to schedule alone time. Rarely did a day pass when I didn’t have something social to do. It was fun as all get out, one of the happiest times of my life. But it wasn’t a solution. As soon as I moved away from Portland, I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. Suddenly, I was that insecure kid again.

All the moving around certainly hasn’t helped. As soon as I start to feel settled, it seems, we’re packing up and moving off to somewhere new, where I have to start building a life all over again. It’s difficult to nurture meaningful relationships when you never live anywhere longer than a couple of years. And I recently realized that I’ve been so busy with all these fresh starts that I haven’t had any time to work on myself. The last time I did was when we lived on Maui. That’s when, suffering from severe depression, I finally read Feeling Good all the way through, which I know I’ve mentioned before. That book was one of the best things to ever happen to me, but I did that work six years ago! 

It’s probably well past time for a mental health refresher. As I recently told a friend, no one ever works out for six months and then expects that to fix their physical health for the rest of their life. It seems silly now to think that one book had fixed all of my insecurities for good.

So there it is, the end of the journey, this conclusion that has been so difficult for me to write down: my loneliness is my own fault. If I don’t want to be lonely anymore, I have work to do. I need to: 1. Fix my insecurities, 2. Change how I interact with people, i.e. try to be less reserved, and 3. Accept that not everyone will want to be my BFF and that’s okay because it’s not a reflection on my worth as a person. A tall order, perhaps, but doable. Not that I expect my loneliness to be cured completely, just like I don’t expect my depression to ever go away completely. Occasionally having bad feelings is all right. It’s part of life. I just don’t want to feel this way all the time. 

This is my final post about loneliness, and I hope that the series has been helpful to those of you who’ve been along for the ride. Maybe you can relate, and it’s helped you to think about the root of your own loneliness. Maybe you can’t relate, but it’s helped you to understand what it’s like for other people. At any rate, I thank you for reading. I plan to continue writing essays, and I hope that you continue to read them. If you have any topic recommendations, feel free to leave them in the comments.

On Loneliness: Social Media

I have a love-hate relationship with social media. I suspect that most people feel this way.

On the one hand, social media has been a boon to my existence. It’s brought people back into my life that I thought were lost to me forever. It’s helped me forge friendships with people I’ve never met in real life. It’s also let me stay in contact with all the wonderful people I’ve met these last six or so years, while we’ve been moving frequently. It helps keep me informed of what’s going on in the world. It makes me laugh every day, and sometimes it even helps me feel better when I’m down.

On the other hand, social media has been a bane of my existence. It makes me feel pressured, like I need to prove to everyone how popular I am. Whether I spend too much time on it or no time at all, I feel like the message people are getting is that I don’t have a “real” life. A lot of people (including people I think are awesome when I see them in person) are jerks on social media. It’s usually so full of bad news that it depresses me, or so full of everyone bitching about inane things that it annoys me. It also frequently makes me feel like I’m missing out on something.

I go through periods where I do a lot of “nothing.” I stay home, watch shows and movies, read, write, and play games. I try not to indulge too much in these periods, because I know that I’ll never get to the end of my life and wish that I’d sat around the house more. But sometimes it feels like how I want to spend my time for a few days, and I think that’s okay. I always enjoy myself. I never feel bad about it - until I get online and see all the awesome stuff that everyone else has been doing while I’ve been a boring homebody. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

I don’t blame social media for the bouts of loneliness and inadequacy I sometimes feel. Some of the loneliest periods of my life occurred well before social media ever existed. But I do think that it’s an extension of the human problem in general, and perhaps of America’s problem more specifically. It’s not truly a place to make connections. It’s a forum for us to show everyone how many friends we have, how successful we are, how attractive we are, and how much we’ve been doing. And it’s not easy to resist getting sucked into all of that. 

There’s nothing new under the sun. Everything you’ve ever felt or thought, people before you have felt and thought for thousands of years. That includes loneliness. I think that being a living, thinking, breathing human being is simply, on some level, an isolating experience. No matter how many loved ones you have, or how much you do, at the end of the day, you’re still alone inside your head. No one else can truly meet you in there.

So I don’t think that social media causes loneliness. I think it’s a symptom of a greater problem. It just happens to be a symptom that, on the surface, seems like a bit of a cure. You go online, like and comment on your friends’ stuff, and they like and comment on yours, and for a while, you feel a little bit happier. You feel loved and validated. But then you close your browser and all that goes away. You’re alone inside your head again. So maybe you go online for longer, or more frequently, trying to get that feeling back. It’s almost like a drug. Maybe it is a drug. I sometimes feel like a drug addict with it. “I’ll just post this real quick and not get on it the rest of the day,” I tell myself. “Oh, but now someone has commented on my post. I want to see what they said, perhaps respond to it. Oh, look, that George Takei is so funny!” Ad nauseum. Ugh.

In and of itself, it’s not the problem, but how we interact with it certainly can be. 

The people in my life I feel closest to, besides my husband, are the few people that I exchange physical, hand-written letters with. While all of these people are also friends online, we rarely talk there. I’ve always been best at expressing myself in the written word, a writer through-and-through. I tend to tell people things in my letters that I don’t tell even the friends I see in person. I’m not the type of person who can easily admit out loud that I’m depressed or lonely or scared. It seems like less of a commitment to write those things down, but I’m not capable of expressing them in one or two sentences either.

And perhaps therein lies the crux of the issue with social media. While it scratches an itch, it’s not the right itch. It alleviates the immediate need without addressing what’s both deeper and more important. I think that’s why, nearly every time I log off, I’m left feeling slightly (or sometimes greatly) disappointed. The more time that passes, the more I think that I need to find a way to disconnect from it, although probably not completely. I feel like I’d be happier without it, or at least without it so easily accessible.

I’m not sure what the right answer is for me on this issue. It’s a bit of a catch-22. On a professional level, as a self-publishing author, I see that I’ll need to become more involved with social media. It’s not a matter of what I want, but of what I need to do to succeed. 

Socially, it can depend on one's circle, whether or not social media is necessary. Fortunately, here in California, my friends tend to make plans via email and text, but when I lived in Texas, most invites came via social media. Right now, it's not necessary for me on the personal level, but I think I'll stick with it so long as the positives outweigh the negatives. And when the bad begins to outweigh the good? Well, I suppose I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

On Loneliness: Modern American Society

Note: To read the other parts of this series, just click on the loneliness tag at the bottom of this post.

Chances are that you forgot about this series, or perhaps thought it was done, because I haven’t posted anything about it since April. I had originally intended three more posts for the series, entitled: My Personality, Modern American Society, and Conclusions. However, the more I thought about it, the more I felt that I’d said enough about my personality, and that what little is left to be said about it will come out in my other posts. Therefore, I decided to cut out that post.

As I sat down to write about American society, I quickly realized that I had a lot to say, and that not all of it necessarily flowed together cohesively. This has led to me spending a lot of time thinking about what, exactly, my point is. After a while, it occurred to me that I had two related points: one specifically about American society, and one about social media, which I don’t see as solely an American issue. Eventually I decided that these two points needed to be addressed separately, which means that, while there will still be three more posts in this series, they’re now entitled: Modern American Society, Social Media, and Conclusions.

Now, on to my musings about American society:

I think that, in an interpersonal sense, it can be very difficult to be an American. We get a lot of mixed messages. One of the most celebrated American characteristics is independence. We’re very proud of our individualism here. (It’s always amused me that the most feared bad guy in the Star Trek universe is the Borg, who strip a person of his/her individuality. It seems like the quintessential American fear.) In America, you’re supposed to be self-reliant. If you get knocked down, you’re supposed to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. If someone wants to help you, that’s fine, but you’re not supposed to ask for it. Asking for help is weak and needy, and that’s bad. At the end of the day, the only person you’re supposed to rely on is yourself.

You would think, with this strong emphasis on rugged individualism, that we Americans would feel encouraged to be a nation of loners, but that’s simply not the case. As much as we are pressured to be self-reliant, we are also pressured to be popular. The implication is that a person can’t be happy or fulfilled if he or she doesn’t have dozens, if not hundreds, of friends. The only time you hear the word “loner” in America, it’s usually coupled with a tone that indicates that loners are weird, undesirable. The person who committed the latest mass shooting? A “loner” who never talked to anyone. Pedophile/rapist? A “loner” who lived in Mom’s basement.

In America, the land of “you take care of yours and I’ll take care of mine,” being a loner is definitely a no-no.

It can all be a bit confusing. I feel like I’m expected to accumulate a huge social network, while, at the same time, I’m told not to depend upon that network. That leaves me to wonder what the point of having all these friends is. Bragging rights? I occasionally enjoy watching game shows and I always laugh whenever someone is set to win a dream weekend getaway with 50 of his or her “closest friends.” Who honestly has 50 “close” friends, I wonder? 50 friends, sure, but “close” ones? I highly doubt it.

Which is not to say that I discourage anyone from pursuing close relationships. If you’ve been reading this series, then you’ll know how much my friendships mean to me. However, the pressure in this country to accumulate as many friendships as humanly possible is intense. I find the idea that all of these friendships could actually be meaningful and close ridiculous. That’s simply not how human interaction works. America, as a nation, sort of feels like a teenager who hasn’t yet figured out that not everyone will like it and/or be its BFF

For my own part, I actually enjoy spending a significant amount of time by myself. I wouldn’t call myself a loner. I enjoy the company of other people. It can be a delicate, and difficult, balance to strike though. If I spend too much time alone, I get depressed, but if I spend too much time with other people, it exhausts me. And I’m not immune to societal pressure. Whenever I take too long of a break from pursuing human interaction, I start to feel like something is wrong with me. I know that feeling didn’t originate from inside of me. I know that it’s me responding to outside messages.

As far as friendships go, all I’ve ever really wanted was a small, core group of true blue companions who will journey through life with me. This has proven frustratingly elusive to attain. When I lived in Portland, I felt like I’d built a strong foundation of friendship. If I still lived there, I’d likely find that to be true. However, I discovered, much to my disappointment, that even in this age of the internet and social media, moving away from your friends means that you simply won’t remain as close to most of them as you were when you lived in the same city. Friendships, like all other relationships, require effort, and most people aren’t willing to put that kind of effort into someone they virtually never see in person.

My husband and I have moved too much these last six years for me to fully form the kind of close relationships I had in Portland. While I understand this on an intellectual level, it’s still difficult to accept. We Americans aren’t especially known for our patience. Also, since I’m an introvert, it’s difficult for me to keep putting myself out there, to work for the kind of connections I want. Additionally, I’ve encountered another problem of American society: our almost pathological need to be busy (or at least appear to be) nearly all the time.

Honestly, I used to come up against this in Portland as well. You meet someone you like, you make an effort to spend time with them, only to be constantly rebuffed because the person just doesn’t have time for you. They’ve got work and self improvement classes and exercise and book clubs/women’s groups/church/volunteer work/whatever and kids and tons of other friends. There’s simply very little room in their schedule for you, no matter how much you may have clicked with them. It’s nearly as infuriating as it is frustrating. 

I’ve always thought that, if people really want to spend time with you, then they’ll make time. If they can’t be bothered to make time, then that’s all you need to know about them. Now I have to wonder if this is the case. I feel like a lot of Americans don’t know how not to be busy, like the busyness fills some kind of void and if they stop to breathe for a few minutes, then they’ll have to think about whatever it is that they’ve been dodging. Busyness is a kind of sickness. I could be overanalyzing, or perhaps even projecting. All I know is, back when I had the “busy bug,” I was mostly trying to flee feelings of loneliness.

Sometimes I think I need to catch the “busy bug” again. It was certainly a time of my life that felt full and fun. However, it didn’t fix my underlying problems then, so I doubt it would fix anything now. Being busy certainly kept me from thinking too much, but it didn’t bring me the kind of connections I was seeking. In the ensuing years, I’ve slowed down a lot, spent lots more time by myself, and figured out that the world didn’t end when I was left alone with my own thoughts. However, that hasn’t brought me the kind of connections I’m seeking either.

I’m still not sure what the answer to this dilemma is. Like most solutions, it probably lies somewhere in the middle. It’s good to be busy, but not too busy. It’s good to make friends, but you should work on cultivating only a few of those friendships into something deeper. It’s good to be your own person, but you really should ask for help when you need it. And by the way, if you like to be alone, that’s okay too. “Loner” shouldn't be a dirty word anymore. 

I feel that everyone should embrace what works for him/her. However, it’s always important to take a step back and reflect on what does work for you. Just because something is “normal” or “correct” by society’s standards doesn’t mean that it’s right for you (note: I am not advocating for any illegal activity). After all, being an individual means not going along with the herd. It means asserting your independence. 

What could be more American than that?

On Loneliness: Romance

I’ve been having trouble writing this piece. Over the last few days, I slowly began to realize that it was because I felt like I was over-sharing. It’s one thing to provide intimate details about one’s friendships. It’s another thing entirely to dish about one’s romantic life. It made me uncomfortable. Therefore, I decided to tone down the details. We’ll have to see, dear readers, if you still find it interesting and/or relatable.

When I speak of my romantic life, I should be clear that there hasn’t been much of one. I spent most of my life without a partner. I didn’t have my first boyfriend until the summer after I graduated high school. The relationship was short lived. Throughout all of college, and well into my 20s, I never had a serious love interest.

It took me a long time to realize that the problem lay inside of me. To be sure, I was a bit of an ugly duckling. I don’t say that in an attempt to gain sympathy or to hunt for compliments. It honestly took me a while to grow into my looks, or at least to accept them. I was in my late 20s before I began to feel like a beautiful swan. I’ve also always been a bit of a tomboy, just “one of the guys.” For a long time, I thought these things were my problem. Not pretty enough, too much of a boy. Not desirable.

Throughout my early 20s, until I met the man who would later become my fiancé, I often felt used. Inevitably, it seemed, the people I became involved with would get what they wanted from me and leave. Or they wouldn’t get what they wanted and leave. Or, even worse, they would leave at the first sign of trouble. I felt like I could never be perfect enough. As soon as I had a bad day, they’d be out the door, running as fast as they could.

It was humiliating and depressing. I was lonely. And I felt abandoned every single time. It got to the point where I didn’t think anyone would stay. I was surprised when someone did. I felt lucky. “Finally, someone is putting up with my crap,” I thought. My fiancé and I put up with each other’s crap for about five years. Things didn’t work out. In the end, I think we’d both agree that this was for the best. To this day, we’re still good friends. When we broke up, I moved out on my own for the first time in my life: no family, no significant other, and no roommate. Just me. I loved it.

But then something bad happened. I’m not going to tell you what, but in order to put the kibosh on wild speculation, I will tell you that it did not involve any form of assault, sexual or otherwise. But it was a big deal at the time. I felt like my life would never be the same. It forced me to take a step back from everything, to evaluate not only my relationships but also myself.

At the time, I was in the middle of grad school, about to start the eight-month process to write my Master’s thesis in order to complete the program. I decided to focus on that. No more chasing after relationships, or even friendships. I threw myself into writing my thesis and put myself back in therapy.

It was the best decision of my life. I’d been through therapy before on more than one occasion. I don’t regret any of the therapy I’ve been through. Each of my counselors was important in his or her way. I felt like the times I’d gone before had been for fixing specific problems, though, like my anorexia. This one was for fixing the rest of me.

I’m not going to tell you that I had some immediate insight because that’s not what happened. There was no lightning bolt. I completed my Master’s degree and got back out into the world, rebuilding the social life that had been neglected while I wrote my thesis. Some time after I finished my degree, my therapist and I agreed that I’d gotten as much as I could in our sessions. What I discovered in the months after that was that now that I was happy with myself, people were drawn to me.

It wasn’t something I did out of any conscious effort. I was happy because I’d finished my degree, something that had been high on the list of things I’d wanted to do with my life. I was also happy because I finally liked myself. I’d gone through an ordeal and come out the other side with the realization that I could rely on myself, that I was strong and clever and accomplished. I realized that I would never need someone else to make me feel better because I knew how to do that for myself.

Not only did I attract more people – in a nine-month period I was asked out on more dates than during the rest of my life combined – but I also attracted a higher quality of person. While none of those relationships, save for the obvious one, worked out, most of them ended with a minimum of drama. I think this was when I finally started relating to my potential love interests like an adult, rather than like a teenager.

When I met the man who would become my husband, I was immediately drawn to him because he challenged me. I wasn’t used to that. He didn’t just accept my opinions; he wanted to know how I had formed them. It could be frustrating at times – it still is – but I liked it. I liked that he made me think. The first time we met, he had a girlfriend. It was disappointing but I moved on. When we met again a couple of months later, he was single. That night, one of the last things he said to me before we parted ways was that happiness is a choice. I didn’t believe him then.

It took me years to accept that he was right. Now it’s the coda that I live by. No matter what we’ve been through – and we’ve been through a lot – I have chosen to be happy. I feel the strongest, mentally and emotionally, that I’ve ever felt. Of course, I obviously still feel lonely sometimes or I wouldn’t be writing this series. But I never feel lonely in my romantic life.

I don’t worry that my husband is going to leave me. I never feel like he’s putting up with my crap. Neither do I feel like I’m putting up with his. That’s not to say it’s all sunshine and rainbows. It’s not. We rarely fight, but we bicker frequently, and sometimes we don’t like each other very much. But it’s okay. That’s life. That’s living with, and relating to, another human being. I married my husband with every intention of staying together forever. That is still my intention. If, for some reason, things don’t work out, however, I know I’ll be okay because I already am. My husband isn’t a void-filler. He’s the man I love.

Love isn’t like how they portray it in chick flicks. No one is going to complete you. If you have a hole inside of you, you need to fill it yourself. It’s no one’s job to fix you. In hindsight, I can see that this was my problem for all those years. I may not have realized it at the time, but I was looking for someone to build up my self-esteem. No one wants that job. Once I learned how to build it up myself, I became more attractive to other people as a by-product.

Sometimes I wish I'd learned this lesson earlier in life. If I had, though, then I probably would never have found myself here. I like here. So instead of wishing to change the past, I'll just be happy to have learned the lesson at all, while enjoying the present and looking forward to the future.

On Loneliness: Friendships, Part 3

If you haven’t read the rest of this series but are interested in doing so, just click on the loneliness tag at the end of this piece.

I had a lot of fun in college. I made several good friends and scads & scads of acquaintances. It was the first time in my life when I truly felt accepted for who I was. Once I made my way into the adult, working world, however, it quickly became apparent that college had been a lovely microcosm that bore little resemblance to what life is actually like.

Upon graduation, I joined AmeriCorps. Having decided at some point during my senior year of college (rather arbitrarily) that I wanted to live in Portland, Oregon, I would have preferred a position there. However, positions in the Pacific Northwest were very in-demand and difficult to land, especially for a first year volunteer (AmeriCorps is a one-year commitment with a second-year option). I therefore settled for a position in rural Minnesota in my preferred area of interest, adult literacy.

I had a difficult time in Minnesota. The state was beautiful. The people I worked with were lovely. The work was challenging. However, I was a 22-year-old in rural Minnesota, sixty miles from the Twin Cities, and very poor. There weren’t a lot of people my age around. I was also deep in the throes of my second bout of anorexia. It was difficult to find interesting things to do. I met some really great people while I was there, people I still consider friends, but the truth is that I felt deeply isolated.

By the end of my year there, I was very depressed. My anorexia was starting to get out of control, so I was also scared. In spite of all of this, I signed up for a second year of AmeriCorps and managed to land a position in Portland, working in children’s literacy.

I arrived in Portland with high hopes. Even so, Portland and I got off to a rough start. I was still very poor, and living pretty far outside of the “happening” parts of town. Although I got into therapy for my depression and anorexia immediately, I continued to struggle. I’d felt so isolated in Minnesota that I was starved for human affection. I was giving off serious “needy” vibes. I knew it at the time but had little control over it.

My interactions with potential friends always left me dissatisfied. I felt like people didn’t like me. They probably didn’t. No one likes needy people. The more I was rejected, the more needy I became. It was a terrible cycle. It didn’t help that this was before the Internet really got popular. I had no idea how to meet people, especially people who had the same interests as me. I saw people around me – people in the same AmeriCorps program – flourishing and it was so frustrating to me that I couldn’t figure out how to do the same.

For a while, I contemplated leaving. A good friend from college had moved to nearby Seattle. I thought it might be easier to build a life in a city where I already had a friend. However, I always preferred the city of Portland itself to the city of Seattle. So I stayed. And eventually, it worked out. It took a few years, the help of my then-boyfriend, and a job change, but it worked out. Later, after people really figured out how useful the Internet is, and groups like Meet Up and Meet In started, it got easy to meet people.

In the end, I lived in Portland for 10 years and I made a lot of wonderful friends while I was there. It wasn’t always easy though. I had a couple of broken friendships, a haunting reminder of what I’d been through as a child. One of those friendships ended by my choice. The other did not. The one that didn’t was very painful for me. It’s something I still feel bad about to this day, seven years later.

I had grown up a lot in college. I grew up even more in Portland, and matured in ways I never could have expected. I re-learned two very valuable lessons about friendship, lessons I'd forgotten after college:

1. Liking yourself is more important than other people liking you. Validation from yourself is the only kind that matters.

2. You don’t have to be friends with everyone who wants to be friends with you. Pick your friends wisely.

I also learned a third lesson that I continue to find difficult to accept:

3. Very few relationships in your life – romantic or friendly – are meant to last forever.

I left Portland, a city I had grown to love deeply, to follow my newly-minted husband to Hawaii. If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know that we’ve moved around a lot since then. In fact, there have been four major and two minor moves in about 5.5 years. It’s been exhausting physically, emotionally, and mentally. It’s also made it very difficult not only to maintain the friendships I already had, but also to build new ones.

I rarely have difficulty with meeting people anymore. As I said, the Internet has made that infinitely easier. Also, I think I’ve become a lot more fun to be around. I’m a lot happier than I used to be, and a lot less serious as well. I joke around a lot. Although I still feel lonely, I rarely feel needy. People, generally, seem to like me. However, although I easily meet and get along with lots of people, I seem to have trouble sealing the deal, so to speak. I have a hard time making the close friendships that I crave.

I think that our transient lifestyle in recent years has a lot to do with this. Unless you’re spending tons of time with a person, you’re not going to build a really deep connection in just a year or two. Some of it is a problem within me, though. Part of me will always be that person who once scared away potential friends. I’m overly conscious of appearing needy or too eager to connect. I tend to be passive when forming friendships, to let the other person make the overt gestures. Because of this, I probably give off a vibe that I’m not as interested in most friendships as I actually am.

Even when I do make what I think are deep connections, I find that, as soon as I move away, they begin to diminish. This was true even of several of the close, long-term friendships I shared in Portland. The truth is that friendships are difficult to maintain over distance. Most people aren’t willing to put in the effort. I don’t think that it’s even a conscious thing. You move, and your friends miss you and you miss them, but eventually, new people are met, new friends are made. You’re still friends, but you’re not as close as you used to be.

Frankly, this has been very disappointing for me. I suppose I’ve been naïve. I keep thinking that my friendships are going to be like ones in movies or books, true blue till the end, but it’s not reality. I think that lesson #3 above has been the toughest lesson of all, but life continues to prove it true over and over again.

A fourth lesson has come out of all this moving around. I’ve learned how to be alone without feeling lonely. Before, I kept loneliness at bay by always being busy. There was even a long stretch in Portland where I had to build alone time into my schedule. These last few years, I’ve gotten comfortable with being by myself. I’ve gotten comfortable with myself. It’s nice. It feels healthier.

Even so, I still go through periods of loneliness. It’s not a longing for interaction; it’s the same longing I’ve always had: deep connections, true blue friends. Sometimes I wonder if I’m searching for something that’s not even possible. Maybe I’ve been fooled by the social narrative. Maybe no one has the kind of friendships I’m looking for. Somehow, I’m not convinced. I think what I want is out there.

I will continue to look. I will continue to work on myself and my hang-ups. I'll probably also continue to feel frustration, but it's a price I'm willing to pay. My hope is that now we're settled for good (in theory), I'll be able to start building strong friendships. The adventure that is life marches on. Most of the time, it feels like I'm just along for the ride.

On Loneliness: Friendships, Part 2

Note: These posts are not intended to give any offense. They are a representation of my thoughts, feelings, and perceptions at the time. AKA, if you considered yourself my friend in high school but don’t see yourself mentioned here, please don’t get mad at me.

Links to Previous Posts in This Series:

Introduction

My Upbringing

Friendships, Part 1

In my last post, I discussed my childhood and junior high friendships, a time when I was left abandoned by friends more than once. Today I’ll mostly be talking about my friendships in high school, a time when I felt I powerless in my friendships.

In high school, I did a better job of making friends than I had when I was younger, especially during my junior and senior years, when I started to come out of my shell (and, thereby, gained a lot of acquaintance friends). My first close friends were two sisters whom I will give the nicknames Red and Jean because their initials happen to coincide with friends referred to in my last post. Red and Jean weren’t sisters by blood. Jean’s father was dating Red’s mother. They and several siblings all lived together as a big, blended family.

Red and Jean were rather “worldly” in comparison to me. Both of them had older boyfriends (brothers, actually, if I recall correctly). They’d had, and knew a lot about, sex. They drank. Red got multiple tattoos while we were still teenagers. I’m sure that most adults looked at them and saw trouble. I wouldn’t say that they were “wild” per se, but even as a kid I understood that I couldn’t be like them if I ever wanted to escape the small-town life that I so hated.

People must have wondered what a goody two-shoes like me was doing hanging around with girls like that. In comparison to them, I was incredibly naïve. We weren’t the best fit as friends. We had little in common. They were kind to me, though, and encouraged me to be less shy. I was in awe of their boldness. All of the power in the relationship belonged to them, because I was so grateful for their friendship. It wasn’t like they ever tried to abuse that power, but the imbalance was there nonetheless.

I often felt starved for their attention, especially after they got serious with their boyfriends. I would have never said a word to them about it though. I was too afraid of losing their friendship. When I was sixteen, I wrote a poem about them (which I never showed them). It reads, in part: “I could never make you understand/The need I have to hold your hand/I could never hope that you would know/That I feel alone even when you touch me so.”

After all these years, those words still hurt when I read them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my friendship with Red and Jean did not survive the high school years.

The summer I turned fifteen, I suffered through a terrible bout of anorexia. I went through it largely by myself. I think that, for the most part, it was a symptom of how out of control my life felt to me. My world was so small and constricted and I wanted so much more. I felt trapped and helpless. One of the few things I could control was what I ate. In a weird way, anorexia gave me power.

Although it only lasted a few months, it was severe. I had weighed less than 90 pounds to start. By time it was over, I was under 70. It’s very possible that I was close to death. In the end, my mother – forever suspicious of therapists – basically force-fed me and I “got over it.” Anorexia wouldn’t rear its ugly head again for six years. (On a happier note, when I moved to Portland in 1998, I finally got professional help & haven’t had a physical manifestation of the disease since. However, the mental side of anorexia is something that will require constant vigilance to keep at bay for the rest of my life.)

Sometime during my sophomore year, I believe, I became close friends with a girl I’ll call Poetry. She was yet another “troubled” girl. Like me, her troubles were more of the mental variety, and hers were more serious. Despite the pseudonym, I don’t feel comfortable delving into her problems here. Just know that they were bad enough that she was eventually sent to boarding school, where we continued a close friendship as pen pals.

Poetry definitely held all the power in our friendship. I remember feeling surprised when she first started talking to me. Why would someone cool and interesting like her want to be friends with me? With the advantage of maturity, I can now see that my problem here wasn’t my friends but me. Obviously, I had severe self-esteem issues. As I kid, though, I didn’t see it that way. I felt profoundly lucky whenever someone wanted to be my friend.

Our friendship did survive into early college, until circumstances that were essentially beyond my control created a rift. They involved a boy. It was not a love triangle, but when I was pressured to be an intermediary, I called it quits. (Sorry to be cryptic, but it’s definitely not something I want to be specific about in a public forum.) I wouldn’t speak to Poetry for years and years after that, although the wonders of social media brought us back in contact, briefly, a few years ago. Although our friendship didn’t re-blossom as I might have hoped, I can report that, at the time at least, she was doing well.

When I was a junior, I met Julie. She was new in town. She’d grown up in another part of the state, living with her mother after her parents had split. However, her mother was physically abusive and, eventually, her father got custody. I don’t recall the details of how we first met or how we became friends.

Julie was a self-described “weirdo.” She liked all the same uncool sci fi & fantasy stuff that I liked. She was loud & obnoxious (igniting, I think, my life-long love for people who are loud & obnoxious). Despite everything she’d been through, she was a strong, confident person who knew what she wanted. She knew who she was. She genuinely didn’t care what other people thought of her. That was mind-blowing to my teenaged self. I really admired her.

Even so, there was a definite power imbalance in our relationship. Like all the other girls, I felt like she was doing me a favor by being my friend. It never occurred to me that my friendship was also valuable. Remember, self-esteem issues = me. I didn’t like myself in high school, so it was difficult for me to understand why anyone else would. Also, by that point, two of my best friends had already abandoned me. It seemed like something that could and would happen to me again at any moment. I spent a lot of my teen years feeling so desperately needy. I suppose a lot of people felt that way, but I didn’t understand that at the time. I felt alone.

As many of you know, my friendship with Julie has a tragic ending. After high school, we drifted apart. Her life took some truly wacky turns, leaving it difficult for me to relate to her. Honestly, I was kind of a judgmental asshole for a while. I eventually got over it and we had just begun to rebuild a friendship when, nearly ten years ago now, she was killed in a horseback riding accident. I still miss her like crazy.

Compared to my earlier years, college was a cakewalk. I grew up a lot in college. I learned to start liking myself (although that would be a lesson I’d have to learn over and over again for YEARS). I learned that others will like you for who you are and, if they don’t, that they’re not people you should be wasting your time on. I learned that you don’t have to be friends with everyone who wants to be friends with you.

I made friends easily in college. Perhaps that seems like an anti-climactic way to end this post, but it’s the truth. While many of the friends I made were of the superficial sort, more acquaintances than anything else, there were several others whose friendships I still have and cherish.

College was a good time but it didn't magically make my life, or me, perfect. My troubles in general followed me into adulthood. So too did my troubles with friendship. In the next installment of this series, we'll see how my friendships evolved as I aged.

On Loneliness: Friendships, Part 1

The more I thought about the topic of friendship, the more I realized that I have a lot to say about it. Therefore, I’ve decided to break this section of the series into three parts. This first part will deal with my childhood & junior high friendships; the second with my high school & college friendships; and the third part will cover adult friendships & conclusions.

I’m one of those people who, on the surface, appears to be really good at friendships. At least, I’m friendly with a lot of people. I have been since college. How can you be lonely? I feel like people are thinking. You know so many people. While that’s true, my friendships have rarely been as close as I would like. Because my family has never been particularly tight, friendships have always been very important to me. However, I’ve always secretly felt that I’m not as important to my friends as they are to me.

Honestly, I’m pretty sure the problem is me. I’m shy about friendships. I like to play my hand pretty close to my chest, not letting people know how much I like them. I’m afraid of appearing overly eager or desperate or, god forbid, needy. I fear rejection.

I’m positive that the seeds of this fear were sown in my childhood, where I faced rejection early and often.

My childhood best friend was the girl who lived across the street. We’ll call her K. We were the same age, but went to different elementary schools. Our friendship mostly stayed in the neighborhood. As I recall it, we were pretty tight.

Things changed the summer before we started junior high together. A girl who lived down the street from us, who was a couple of years younger, broke us up. It was something I didn’t understand then. I still don’t really understand it today, nearly 30 years later. I’m not sure what her end game was. Maybe she was just being evil in the way that girls that age can be evil. The details are fuzzy for me now, but I clearly remember her telling us lies about things each of us supposedly said about the other.

I’m not sure why it worked. As I remember it, I didn’t believe her lies, but K did (granted, my memory could be faulty, allowing me to remember things the way I want rather than how they were). It was very bewildering and painful. In the end, I went into junior high without a best friend. K and I never really made up. Years later, when we were in high school, we discussed the break up briefly and had a laugh about it. But we were never friends again.

In junior high, I had two close girlfriends, N and C. If my memory serves correct, N and I were closer in sixth grade, and I became close to C later, after she moved from another state into my neighborhood. C and I were close enough that we chose to be locker partners in eighth grade, a huge deal because we were required to carry our eighth grade locker partners over into ninth grade, which was at the high school.

Junior high was a tough time for me. I’d been teased to some extent in elementary school, but it was really bad in junior high. Kids were mean. I was easy pickings. N was the first in my long string of friendships with girls that I would now call “troubled.” She came from an even rougher background than me. She lived in a trailer park – a huge social stigma where I grew up. She was even more awkward looks-wise than me. The kids were even meaner to her than they were to me. That’s probably what brought us together. We were united in misery.

C, on the other hand, was pretty normal. I think I started out as a friend of convenience for her. Since she was new to the area, and we lived only a few doors down from one another, I was one of the first people she met. Even so, we quickly became close. I liked her a lot.

I don’t know for sure what happened between me and C. I don’t remember if we had an actual falling out over something. I don’t think so, because as I recall it, partway through eighth grade, C just started to be mean to me out of nowhere. It actually got pretty bad. When I fell in gym one day and sprained my arm and had to go to the hospital, I came back to school the next day to find that C had torn down all of my pictures in our shared locker. This was nothing like it had been with K, where we broke up and then essentially ignored one another. C had a lot of vitriol toward me. Once again, I was thoroughly bewildered.

In hindsight, I believe that C had finally figured out that being friends with me was social suicide, so she dumped me. In high school, she moved on to a more popular clique (not that it was hard to find a group more popular than me). After muddling through ninth grade as uneasy locker partners, we never spoke again.

At the same time, my friendship with N cooled. I don’t remember why. We were never not friends; we just weren’t as close anymore. I know my mother didn’t approve of her, but that probably had little to do with it. Now, I wonder if I did to her what C had done to me, dumping her because she was even lower on the social totem pole than me. I hope this is not the case, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Most preteens are assholes, even me. Whatever the problem, she didn’t deserve my ingratitude. She was really nice. A good friend. 

N got pregnant in high school and dropped out. I’ve never spoken to her again, although she kindly left condolences on my mother’s online obituary (actually, so did K).

It’s probably important here to reiterate that all of this was happening amidst a home environment where I was rarely encouraged to pursue friendships. In fact, my mom often made it difficult to have friends, not allowing parties or sleepovers, complaining if I was on the phone too long, refusing to drive me places, etc. I don’t know if this was a concerted effort on her part to deny me friends or just a lot of different quirks of her personality coming together in a very negative way.

The upshot is, I had a lot of odds stacked against me, and although I struggled hard against them, by time I was fourteen, I’d already been rejected by two of my closest friends. It hurt and it affected the way that I saw friendship from there on out.

Join me next time to discover if I fared any better at friendships in high school.

On Loneliness: My Upbringing

You’ll have to be patient with me on this series. Writing about this stuff is a struggle for me. It’s hard to order my thoughts into coherent paragraphs. Also, thinking about all of it brings up a lot of bad feelings. The series will be finished eventually, however, no matter how much I occasionally consider abandoning it.

I come from a very small family. For most of my childhood, it was just me, my mom, and my two older brothers against the world.

My parents divorced before I turned two. My dad was never around much after that, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. People occasionally say to me, “You never mention your dad.” That’s because he’s a self-absorbed alcoholic and a pathological liar. He’s fairly harmless but essentially a waste of space. He paid the child support and, until his mom died, saw us maybe once or twice per year. Other than that, he’s AWOL to this day.

Both of my maternal grandparents died pretty young – my grandma about five months before I was born & my grandpa when I was two. My paternal grandma did her best to be a part of our lives. I think that she struggled with financial constraints, though, on top of living several towns away from us. We simply didn’t see each other as much as we would have liked. She died the summer I turned twelve.

My mom & dad each had a brother, both of whom were married and had two children each. However, we never spent a lot of time with either of their families. I grew up without ever really knowing my four cousins. If I saw them on the street now, I probably wouldn’t recognize them.

I’m telling you all of this because I want you to know that when I say I’ve been lonely for most of my life, you can see why that is: growing up, I didn't have a lot of people on my side, so to speak. And while we had little to do with our extended family, the gap that they left wasn't exactly filled with friends.

My mom had a lot of quirks. She didn’t like to ask for help from anyone. We struggled financially when I was really young, so I grew up pretty poor. Mom didn’t like for people to know how much we struggled, so we virtually never had people over to the house. She was very sensitive. She felt slighted easily. She often took things people said the wrong way, something she and I butted heads about continually once I reached adulthood (she always thought I was secretly saying something I wasn’t, which made it difficult for me to talk to her about anything). I think this is why she herself didn’t have very many friends. She never encouraged us to make friends either. When I did make friends, she never seemed to like them.

I feel like I grew up without ever being properly socialized. I spent a lot of time with my brothers and their friends (other boys from the neighborhood). I really only had one close childhood friend, the girl who lived across the street. My brothers and I virtually never engaged in any extracurricular activities like Scouts or camp or sports. We could never afford them. As a child, I never had a birthday party with friends. I never had a sleepover or went to one. We never left our neighborhood much, except to go to school.

At school, I excelled academically but struggled to make friends. Adults loved me. Kids thought I was weird. I was very shy, introverted and bookish. Due to our monetary issues, I often wore my brothers’ hand-me-downs and probably wasn’t as clean as most other kids (my mom was so ultra-frugal that she kept utility bills down in part by not allowing us to bathe every day). Also, being fatherless was still a bit of an oddity back in the early 80s. The teasing didn’t really begin in earnest until I reached junior high – when kids turn especially evil – but by then pretty much everything was wrong with me: I was poor; I wasn’t even remotely cool; I was too skinny; I had a stupid last name; I wasn’t attractive (seriously: my “awkward phase” lasted well into adulthood). I simply didn’t fit in.

I basically grew up feeling like a social reject and I was too socially inept to figure out how to fix it. I couldn’t wait to move away from my hometown for good. Nowadays, my acquaintances always seem surprised when I give them a truncated version of my sad childhood. “How did you turn out so normal?” I’ve had people ask. It makes me laugh. I don’t feel normal at all; I guess I’ve just gotten good at acting that way. Not that I’m not genuine. I really am as nice and friendly as I appear to be. On the inside, however, I always feel a little lost in social situations. “Did I just say/do the wrong thing?” I frequently wonder. “Does that person even like me?”

It makes me sad to think that you can never truly outgrow the way you were brought up no matter how hard you try. Believe me, I’ve tried pretty hard. I went through several rounds of therapy in my 20s. I feel the strongest now – mentally and emotionally – that I’ve ever felt. But the self-doubt never goes away completely. Some part of me will always feel like that lonely loser nerd who grew up with hardly any friends.

And that's pretty much that, in a nutshell. If I have a tendency toward loneliness, it's only because I've been lonely since I was a kid. As we'll see in the next part of the series, however, my checkered experience with friendships hasn't exactly helped the matter. 

I'll see you for that some time in the next few weeks.

On Loneliness: Introduction

I’ve been thinking about writing an essay series on loneliness for a while now. Loneliness is something I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. It comes and it goes. Being in a relationship and/or having good friends has always been a buffer against it, although not a complete one. Sometimes, in a room full of people, I feel completely alone. Other times, I feel as though my heart could burst with joy because my life is so incredibly full of good people.

My sense of loneliness upon moving to Dallas has been both strong and persistent. Moving to new places and forming new friendships has always been difficult for me. For example, I lived in Portland for more than two years before I felt like I’d made close friends. On Maui it took over a year. Austin was an anomaly; I felt like I made an instant group of friends there. Perhaps that is what has made Dallas seem especially difficult. It’s hard to accept that I have to tap into my reserves of patience and perseverance again.

The decision to blog about it hasn’t been easy though. I’ve never been particularly eager to put my problems on blast. I feel very stoic about it all, if you will. I don’t want to trouble anyone, for goodness’ sake. I don’t want to be anyone’s burden.

But then I thought that maybe talking about it isn’t really about me in the end. Maybe it’s about giving a voice to anyone who’s ever felt lonely. Maybe I have something to say that they’d like to hear, or that they’d like other people to hear.

My other problem with blogging about it is one of organization. I have so much to say. On the other hand, I’m not sure how to say any of it, at least not in a way that’s cohesive or makes sense. So that’s why this is going to be a series, one that has clearly-defined themes for each piece. I believe that the themes will be as follows:

My Upbringing

Broken Friendships

Romance

My Personality

Modern American Society

Conclusions

I may add more themes as I proceed and explore. Consider this first piece to be the introduction or, perhaps, overture (hence the title).

I’m not sure yet where this essay journey is going to take me. Perhaps I will have an epiphany or two. Perhaps I will come up with a plan of action to eliminate loneliness from my life. Or perhaps nothing will come of it, or at least nothing more than a few words on a page.

Regardless, I'm taking the journey. This is your formal invitation to take it with me. Let's see where it goes together.