There are a lot of things I’m lacking in life. I’m talking about intangibles here: human interaction, productivity, mastery, fulfillment, those kinds of things. My chains of action are broken for various reasons, and when they break I often find myself thinking about exactly what it is I need in that situation, and how to go about getting it.
The thing is that I do know (in most of these cases) what I need and how to get it. But trying to get moving along the chain of action just doesn’t work. My brain fuzzes out and I feel… well, I feel a lot of things. And this post isn’t so much about disorders I may or may not have and how they’re messing with me as it is about how I feel.
I feel like shit.
One of the things I’ve identified that I need is social interaction, and the companionship and intimacy that comes with that. And it’s pretty obvious how I should go about getting it: meet people, talk to people, do things with people, get to know people. Easy, right? And I’m not even particularly shy or nervous about any of that; I’m confident (or at least I can pretend to myself and others that I’m confident) and shameless, and when I’m in the moment everything is great. However, getting to the moment is the problem. Getting up the motivation to spend the effort going out and doing things with people is really hard. Most of the time Inner Critic is screaming about how traffic and parking will be annoying and time-consuming, how food and drink will be expensive and how I shouldn’t spend that money, how terrible it will be to be away from my home and my things, how there will be people out there who I don’t trust, etc. And all that, of course, is all assuming I was able to get myself to make those plans with other people in the first place. Goddamned Inner Critic.
Even worse than all that, though, is that I can barely get myself to talk to people in the first place. Tonight I was lonely, what with Alice being in France, myself having had an unproductively bad mental day, and some other crap I won’t get into here. That scenario isn’t particularly out of the ordinary. Sometimes even when Alice is here in the room with me I’ll still feel lonely. It reminds me of the lines from Robert Haas’s poem “The Privilege of Being”: “…the woman says to the man,/I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized/that you could not, as much as I love you,/dear heart, cure my loneliness,/wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him/that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.”
Anyway, here’s what tends to happen when I feel lonely like that: I throw some IMs or text messages or phone calls at my close (read: “safe”) friends, but they aren’t responsive because they’re busy with their own lives (which is something I’m working really, REALLY hard to stop BLAMING them for; that’s one of my thought distortions that actively and unfairly hurts other people). I bounce back and forth–half-heartedly but hungrily–between social networking sites and forums between feeble attempts to do something meaningful on my own. I consider participating–writing some replies in threads that interest me, maybe asking some questions, maybe even making a thread about something–but almost invariably back down with thoughts of how much mental effort it would take to commit myself and engage and deal with potential negativity and etc. Finally, I look at my instant messenger contact list, thinking that I’ll IM someone and talk for a while, but in pretty much every instance Inner Critic will come up with a reason why I shouldn’t. Some of these reasons have to do with how I think the other person perceives me, and are usually untrue. Other reasons have to do with ways that I might find the interaction stressful, because of supposed characteristics of the other person, and those are almost always untrue. So this person thinks that I’m uncool and wouldn’t want to talk to me, that person might be too gregarious and thus annoying to talk to, and this other person has been bothered by me quite enough and should be left alone.
THOUGHT DISTORTIONS (usually).
If I’m unresponsive to you, it almost certainly has nothing to do with my having any (real) negative opinion of you. If I don’t answer your messages or return your emails or schedule lunches with you, it’s because this asshole in my head is holding me back, whether directly (via the methods above) or indirectly (via depressive lack of motivation or via anxiety-driven avoidance behavior). The truth is that I want to talk, I want to hang out, I want to get to know you and let you know me. I’m not saying do the work and compensate for my crap, I’m just saying please don’t think I’m intending to be a jerk, and please don’t give up.
Yeah, I’m talking to you.
(Lots of people say things like “I’m talking to you” or “all of you are so wonderful” or other similar generalizations in touchy-feely posts, and there’s always the people (like me) who think, “I’m sure that doesn’t include me.” I considered putting a huge list of names here to make the point that yes, I actually DO mean YOU, but on further examination that idea seemed kind of silly. Suffice it to say that I can only think of MAYBE two or three people in the world who I would not want to have an earnest conversation with, so unless you know of some giant reason for me to hate you, it’s safe to say you’re included. No, a spat over Facebook comments (to give one particular example) is not a giant reason, at least not on my end.)
Anyway, so yeah, there’s that.