Weekly Thoughts 5/6/23

I saw Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Thursday, and it is amazing!!! Truly one of, if not the, best Marvel movies to date! It looks stunning, the characters were at their peak, and the story was everything you could want it to be. I won’t say too much since it’s opening weekend, so I’ll just say that I cried a few times. Today, it’s Free Comic Book Day. I’ll be heading down in the afternoon, after I finish up with this post. I’ve been tight on money lately, and I probably won’t get much today, either. It’ll be nice to do a cool comic thing, though.

Anyways, this week…I didn’t plan ahead for a topic, to be honest, so let’s figure it out. The most developed idea I have comes from listening to a podcast, Quick Question with Soren and Daniel. In it, the hosts talked about how they met and became friends. Soren had studied abroad and experienced how hard it is to make friends in a new place as an adult, so when he came to LA, he decided to be the person who helps others make friends.

It’s a very nice thing to do, and something I wish more people did. Basically since…hm, sixth grade, I guess, I had really started to retreat into myself. A friend from elementary school moved away, and I didn’t have as strong a connection to anyone else in our friend group. There were a few experiences leading up to that which really drove home to me that I was different in some way from everyone around me, and my brain was intent on not letting me figure out why so that I wouldn’t have to do anything about it. So I melted into the background and couldn’t connect with anyone around me. That continued into high school, for the most part; I wasn’t able to reach out and make friends with people on my own. I was very self-absorbed and became desperate because I forgot how I ever made friends to begin with, or even decide who I’d want to be friends with.

But I didn’t have no friends. After school, I would hang out at the library until it was time to catch the bus. A guy in my grade also went to the library, and for whatever reason, he kept talking to me. At the time, it didn’t occur to me to ask about that. Eventually, I learned that we shared hobbies, and I would see him at school, and I ended up becoming a part of his friend group. That gave me a table at lunch to sit at, and since I had someone to be open and sociable with in public, I was able to make other friends at the library. I’m really grateful to him for all of that.

Then I went to college, and I didn’t have the same sort of luck. I did make a few friends, although I don’t remember how. I think I just shared classes with a few people and we worked together on assignments. Typical forced socialization with people your age, of the sort you only really get at school. Cuz I certainly didn’t reach out to them first; I was aware of my gender and sexuality at the time, and I was overpacked with anxiety about reaching out to the pretty people I ended up friends with. I also lucked out with two out of three roommates when I did my internship in DC. Work was never a particularly good place to make friends, for me. It’s much more task-oriented, with little opportunity for socialization that doesn’t leave me feeling guilty about not doing my job. I’m on good terms with people, but I don’t have that many experiences with hanging out with coworkers outside of work. The times I did were from my first job in retail, when I was also one of the many teenagers they hire for those crap jobs. Outside of that, I made one really good friend through an online dating app, and that’s the most success I’ve ever had with one.

I’m a lonely person, and I’m afraid of being alone forever. All my anxiety and depression around my social life makes me think of myself as someone with no friends who will never make any friends. When I lay it all out like this, I see that I’m not as inept or as isolated as I feel. That said, though, it doesn’t take away the fear and anxiety around social situations. I’m terrible, almost incapable, of reaching out to someone without a “reason,” so I mostly wait for others to reach out to me. Even when I am talking to people I like and trust, I have a hard time opening up. Intellectually, I know there’s no reason to think I’ll get hurt, but that’s all I can think about. I’m very risk averse in that way. When I think about ways to address these issues and talk myself up to be brave, I get bogged down in minutia. How can I tell who would be a friend? What should I talk about? How much of my feelings can I show them?

That’s always the part that gets me the most. If I just followed my gut, then I would only be trying to befriend the hottest people around me. I always fall for my friends, and on paper, I’m pretty sure friendship and romance are the same relationship. Ideally, I would be able to openly flirt with my friends and make out with them sometimes. I badly want to kiss everyone, all the time. I know that’s not the common view of how friendship works, and I’m afraid that the amount of love in my heart would scare people away. I’ve said before that I don’t do well in group situations; if I don’t have one person to focus on, I can get overwhelmed, and I fall back to being an observer. At the same time, I couldn’t be the first to reach out and ask to hang out with a person one-on-one, because that’s a date. Like, I don’t think they’ll think it’s a date, necessarily (although that would be amazing). I would think it’s a date, because it definitely is and that’s definitely how I’ll think about it. A date is so much more pressure than hanging out; I actually feel the panic, rather than just immediately resign to my inability to overcome anxiety. I start to think things are dates just because I’m having a fun conversation with someone.

And even before I get to the point of opening up, I’m not sure how I would make the approach. Boredom is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, and I’m always staving it off. For that reason, I’ve always had to occupy my own time. I don’t go out without some activity in mind, whether that’s the trip itself or something for off time. All this to say, I’m never sitting around wondering what I want to talk to someone about. I think about that when the opportunity to talk comes up, and I never have an answer. My brain freezes up, and perhaps too reflexively, I assume no one wants to talk about what’s on my mind. It doesn’t seem like a good strategy to lecture someone on how criminally under the radar School Zone Girls is. At the same time, I’ll never learn if someone else wants to talk about that unless I get to know them.

In the end, I’m just scared of doing the wrong thing and pushing people away. I don’t get to spend as much time with people as I want, and it’s scary to make a move on my own to change that. If I do it wrong, I’ll really end up alone forever. So I fantasize about people coming to my rescue, a situation that will likely never happen. Especially since I’m very sensitive to the idea of people “taking pity on me” and refuse to appear vulnerable or needy in public. I want to be friends with people who genuinely want to be my friend; I want to be wanted. So my killer strategy for that ends up being to never show them who I am and appear content to do my own thing, I guess? I don’t think I’m a boring person. I’m a martial and comics artist who graduated college summa cum laude in three years; it’s not a story you hear very often. And I’d like to think that, when I don’t have RBF, I’m cute. I try to be nice to everyone, and I genuinely enjoy hearing people talk. Historically, people like me. I’m the one who needs to be convinced of that. My confidence in any social skills I have doesn’t yet outweigh my fear of being rejected by others, and changing that is the real mystery.