Maybe I can write a less whiny and more condensed version of what I'm thinking and feeling than I managed the first time around. The feeling is still there, and it's part of the "dread" or "hopelessness" picture when I'm trying to make living where I do suck less.
I'm not so stupid as to believe people aren't living their own lives doing things they enjoy or spending time with people they care about. I know how many jobs work us to death. I know what it is to always be playing catch-up on chores or projects. I know we have many things related to family we obligate ourselves to. All of this is a perfect recipe to just be "busy" and "adult" in perpetuity.
My problem goes as far back as college and the transition right after. Things switched in the minds of the people I was trying to go to the ice rink, dance, or hit a slip-n-slide with. It was either/or. Either you buckled down and focused on powering through the infinite stress of growing up, getting a job, moving across the country, or lining up your vision of the perfect future, or you were seemingly arrested in your development and devoid of an appreciation for the "normal" stressors and obligations.
At one level, it's kind of insulting that a reflexive perspective might take shape that way. It's as if my life hasn't been as many deliberate and conscious decisions to trend the way it has. It's as if I wasn't attempting to make specific efforts to maintain relationships, often with zero feedback on maybe more preferred methods of doing so. Of course, I couldn't fight the hate and gossip train I wasn't precisely plugged into.
At a less personal level, I see this tendency and self-justification dozens of times a week. No amount of work is enough. There's like an innate unwillingness to put a budget together to know what your floor or basic needs are. There really is no secret behind the ways you can help yourself literally in any moment you choose to. I needed $317 a month to live in the town house. I need SNAP or a food bank and about $7000 a year to pay my utilities, taxes, insurance, and to register my cars. How insane would I look going to all of these shows if I didn't know that?
It's really hard not to think people just hate me. I know it's more they don't really give a fuck, but that's not necessarily a better feeling lol. I know it's a case-by-case thing for any given person I might consider. But just feeling obligated to constantly make excuses why people only have time for you on their terms puts you in an incredibly poor place mentally. They're not merely establishing a boundary as though I'm like self-destructive and inviting them into a world of drug use or otherwise chaos. I'm just not…I'm just not. Not what they're about. Not what they're interested in talking to. Not worth the gas money. Just not.
I'm trying really hard to figure out how to responsibly grow a network and create a bullwork against resentment for maintaining what feels like incredibly loose and distant associations. It's something of a persistent antagonist to be left "desperate" to find someone who has 3 hours to occupy a free ticket to one of the best bands. It's fascinating to me that people go to shows 3 or 4 or more deep in color coordinated clothing. Do I overhear their conversations and know I don't necessarily want to be friends with them? Sure. But sometimes I feel like I get more goodwill from strangers at these shows whether I was looking for it or not.
It's an existential worry to think either I'm so abjectly miserable to be around or that huge swaths of my immediate circle seem fundamentally incapable and unwilling to manage their time or budgets. Neither is a great prospect, a healthy mix of the infinite worlds in between those options isn't good either. And, like, what am I going to do about it? Give up and never invite anyone to anything again? Start placating and feeling more comfortable with an idea akin to, "Nothing really matters, just go have fun and fuck 'em!" I don't actually desire being cold and closed-off or ambivalent about really anyone I was remotely friends with. I can't think of any perspective I've been invited to adopt more often.
I don't think I'm wrong for maintaining a desire to connect, but I'm growing suspicious that I've developed a wholly destructive metric on who to engage with and under what conditions. Overwhelmingly, I've had friendships based around partying, fucking around, some intellectual-enough conversations, and what I previously understood as more laid-back and non-judgmental dispositions deeply disguised. If those people were merely working on modern maskings of their inherent disillusion, okay, cool? Less my fault for falling for a group psychological coping mechanism?
What I understand the vast majority of relationships or friendships to be based around is a policy of "Don't ask, don't tell." Don't tell your girl her ass looks fat in those jeans. Don't dig into weeds of what constitutes the "love," just keep painting layer and layer of cliché lore over the struggles you've been through or "deep" conversations you've had and squeeze the fuck out of any positive emotion so as to drown out the screams of conflicting evidence or feelings of loneliness.
If you relay the harm or boredom or feelings of rejection and being misunderstood, you risk doing mostly everything alone. Even those of us who may prefer to be alone more often than not, after a while, it's really hard not to entertain the worst thoughts for too long. In the face of trying to remind myself that there's all of this great music and things to do, coupled tightly to that is the "What am I doing wrong?" feeling when, notably everyone else around me, seems to have figured something out I can't. The large pack of gentlemen show up as a large pack of gentlemen. The girls with cuts on their arms and thighs walk hand and hand. The "quirky" couple who met at a particularly rousing DnD game. The bands of white trash circle up and smoke and boast competing beer bellies.
I do notice a handful of single concert goers. It's mostly dudes like me, but awkward. They sometimes occupy the space next to me after intuitively recognizing no one's coming lol. A single girl at a concert is always fairly young and in "independent badass" mode in how she dresses or does her make-up.
I don't know that it's even possible to get an "honest" assessment of what feels like an overt cultural disposition. It feels inherently dishonest, predicated on maintaining a façade of connection or understanding with familiar binding truths appearing to exist solely in beleaguered subtext. Even the "most likely" assessment of a healthy mix of forces does not turn any one of those forces into a "good" excuse or "palatable" reason for carrying on with anything but a spiteful resolution if you're me.
I don't think I'm wrong. In fact, every day I do something cool on top of "productive" or "adult" it serves an argument that I'm doing as right or more right than anyone. Consider this blog and the nature of my stress. I might blow $20 on a ticket that doesn't get used? I spent $35 on sugar alcohol 2 days ago. I "don't have any friends" while simultaneously judging what I overhear, and the looks and bonds of the crowds I see? I'm headed to Seattle next week to hang with Hatsam, in an Instagram conversation with Julie as I type this, and am going to dinner with Byron and our old neighbor tomorrow after hopefully meeting with Hussain who I assume is days away from a stress-induced heart attack. Me and Brandy are trying to figure out what next excursion we should take. See, friends. Sometimes Smash even responds to texts.
There's an irony in it taking work to relax, but it's true. It's work to drive, to budget, to stand in the sun, and to deal with any of the associated stress of being around a lot of people in unfamiliar environments. But it's better stress. It's good memories. It's opportunities to bond over something besides trauma or taken-for-granted obligations. You think my life's going to get harder or easier as I get older? Certainly harder. Who knows about easier, but I can confidentially say I was trying to make the most of it today, tomorrow, over the weekend, and next week until the cancer or dementia or car accident hit. You can't take the 82 shows this year I've been to away from me. I've not stopped trying to develop the land. I'm no less a salaried professional preaching the skills I practice to not get addicted to my own brain's bullshit.
10-15 years ago I was predicting that about now I'd become more relevant in my "old" friend's lives again. After the divorces. After the failed plots romanticizing Colorado or some other dreamy locale. It's not happening yet, but also I don't know if I'm still cool with any of those people anyway. I don't think I need to be or that it would necessarily be wise to try. What I do know is that things have only gotten more expensive, more demanding, less empathetic, more selfish (as if either of the last two seem possible), and whatever I might make of my struggle, it's peanuts if I had anything to care for beyond these cats and myself. Wouldn't it be nice if I could pretend I don't talk to almost 200 people a week about how stressed out, disorganized, and terrible at self-care they are? You think you're not addicted to the same hamster wheels?
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