I took off last week because I was getting ready for vacation. It’s really nice to be away from it all for a while. Besides it being nice to relax, it reminds me that I need to get an active hobby. I won’t develop any energy for the day if I don’t move around some. Sometimes I think it’s silly when I take walks, because my job is to walk around all day, but it’s hard to think of a better place to start. I’d collapse if I started running right away.
More specifically, I’m on vacation visiting my parents. It’s great to see them, and no better a highlight for your life to think about how “grown-up” you are. I’ve recently been promoted at work, I’m managing to hold down my life in my current situation, and I’m taking little steps, at least, towards my passions in life. There are many respects in which I don’t feel grown-up at all still, as I’m approaching three decades. I had a coworker who’s tall, though shorter than me, and a parent, so I naturally assumed she was older than me for a while. I mean, if she’s a mom, she’s a big strong adult, and I’m like twelve, right? Someone would have told me otherwise by now, right?
There are two general categories of concerns in this regard. First are general expectations of life. The picture of a life trajectory where you leave home for college, then get a job and apartment, and then get a house, and then start a family – that’s all a dream created less than a hundred years ago. It’s a nice dream, but it’s also not a measure of success or failure. I’m not sure how much of it I want, but it’s also the only strong vision of “how life goes” that I have, so I think about it. The biggest thing for me is that I expected and wanted to have a better job and living situation by now. I got a good job once, and I liked my coworkers, the defined schedule, and the subject matter quite a bit. I was excited to be in that environment and to have a place to grow. I also had a much better apartment in a better city. But all that went away in a couple years due to some upheaval in leadership causing the office to get downsized. I feel listless and stuck in my current job, I have a harder time planning out how I can pursue my art as a career, and I’m paying the same price I paid for my good apartment for my current, much worse apartment in a less desirable town, with less money. It’s not like I have this dream job in my degree field, because I was told to do something I enjoy and I picked a topic I like reading and discussing more than doing; that said, I did the college part, and I’d like for it to have led somehow to the good job and apartment part. The living situation is the part I know I want most clearly. I like having my own place, and it was nice when I had a regular schedule around which I could make time for cooking and drawing.
I really feel left behind in a lot of ways. I never fully knew what I wanted or how to get it, and then it was time to go off on my own and make a life. I don’t regret making that move, because I really wanted it and I liked it, but I didn’t realize how little I had of anything else until I was out there. It seemed like things usually worked out on their own; I’d get it eventually. That hasn’t panned out, so far. I already felt like I was struggling to define what I actually wanted in life when I had that nice job, and looking back, I can’t imagine doing office work again. I’ve spent the past few years since paddling as hard as I can to hold onto a sliver of a life, and I still don’t have a forward in view.
I’d like to get to a better city, but I’m not sure how to get there or what kind of job would afford me that life. I have no idea what career in comics I actually want and don’t really know what any career there looks like to begin with. I want to improve my living situation more immediately, but I’m overwhelmed thinking about the number of large purchases I’d have to make, how long they’d have to be stretched out since I can’t make them all at once, and how long I’d have to sacrifice other desires to afford it. I should really be looking for a new place about now, to get an idea for prices, since my lease renewal will be up soon and I just know they’re going to try to raise my rent again (it’s seriously overpriced). I can’t find a good lead on where I could go to potentially get diagnosed, and don’t know where else or how to look. Outside of that, if it’s not clear, I have a hard time identifying needs and wants to seek out that other people could help me with.
That’s the other thing I want from that dream life of the fifties. Like, not marriage and a family necessarily, but people in my life. Friends and relationships. I’ve barely had one relationship, and I don’t have any friends I hang out with. As a kid, it never occurred to me that there was a skill or activity to making friends, because I was in school, the only place everyone goes where you’re surrounded by people in your age group who want to be friends with others. By comparison to the majority of your time on Earth, it’s so much easier to make friends in school. Even today, I assume other people got a class or something that I didn’t get on how to make friends with people. I’m still stuck on very basic questions. How do you identify someone you want to be friends with? How do you start conversations? How much work should I be putting in to maintain a friendship? What kind of relationship qualifies as one? How emotionally vulnerable or open can I be, and that I should expect my friend to be?
I still very much think of friendship and a romantic relationship as being roughly the same on paper, besides vague, socially constructed views on what’s appropriate in one and not the other. “Romantic feelings” are themselves a misnomer in their context, since romance is an idyllic view of life; as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, love is love, and the rest is details. All those questions about friendship also apply to dating. Hanging over all of this is the overwhelming fear of being alone forever. One wrong move, one unlikeable moment with even one person, and I’ll be alone forever. Dating is so much higher stakes, because as far as I’ve been able to observe, it’s not considered reasonable to be thirty and not know how dating works or what you want from it, and that’s my situation. I can’t know what I want because I don’t know what I’m missing. Maybe it’s where I live, but even five years ago, I couldn’t go on a dating app without everyone’s profile saying they were looking to settle down and get serious. I have no idea where I could go to find people in my age range who want something more casual, where I could figure out what a relationship is like and what I might want from one. The only thing I know I want is human touch, and, “all I want is sex,” is not a great thing to be my age saying that out loud to other people. Not that I have, or know where to go where I could; dating apps are an exercise in humiliation for me, but they’re something, which I can’t say about the concept of going out to meet people. Like, where? How? Not just in the context of this tiny, boring place I live, where there’s nothing to do, either. Since socializing isn’t a skill I have, an activity I can perform, I don’t know where to do it.
I don’t want to be saying “I don’t know” so much, and I get on myself for it. I’m sure that I know more than I give myself credit for, and I have more skills than I think. I’ve seen as much in a few parts of my life. It’s just all so overwhelming, all these anxieties that take the form of a thousand endless and open-ended questions that I can’t answer with definitive words. It’s so much easier to stay at home and focus on my hobbies, even if that’s not the “grown-up” thing to do. I’ve done as much so far in life to get things right in front of me, and it’s becoming less and less tenable not to reach for things farther ahead, where everything is darkness. I’m just so tired from spending a decade foundering around in ignorance while everyone expects me to have all the answers, and even sometimes praise me for it.
Weekly Thoughts 4/6/24
Life in the Gutters 