tasmanian devil

I have this really potent, wild memory that has crept back into my thoughts lately.  

I was around five.  Dad was out, Mom in the living room, Ariel was a snoozing baby.  I snuck up onto the kitchen counter.  It was crooked, a standalone construction that, like the rest of the kitchen, was tilted about 10 degrees horizontally.  You could put a ball in the entry door and it would roll on its own down to the stove.

Anyway, I had not yet climbed a counter in my life due to my mother's repeated warnings about breaking a collarbone, which happened to her at three years old from climbing on a counter.  And hers I think was perfectly level.  I don't remember much else about the counter other than that it had some weird laminate on the top of it that peeled off over the years.  Not sure if that was original or another hideous redesign.  I crawled up, grabbed the sugar from a higher shelf, and sat down on the counter.

The sugar was in a rectangular tin that had a strawberry print on it.  (Etsy tells me that it's made of brass.) 

I opened the tin and started spooning the sugar into my mouth.  I'd never done this before, either.  My exposure to this sugar tin was limited to the smattering of sugar Mom would put on my oatmeal, rice (yes, instant rice with butter and sugar) and in my already sugared breakfast cereal.  It wasn't something to be eaten on its own.  However, lucky little jerk of a sister got her pacifier dipped in sugar whenever she cried.  Are you appalled yet? Horrified? Yeah, me too I guess.  But that was just life, I'm sure plenty of Appalachians relate. 

I didn't know what motivated me to sit there and eat it.  I remember how utterly gritty it felt, and that it was sour and burned going down.  I felt thirstier than I ever had in my life.  There was nothing pleasant about it.  And yet I got some weird euphoria out of sitting there.  I was smugly eating the forbidden food, dangling my legs above the floor like a wild person, focusing on choking down the grainy solid while I stared at that ugly linoleum on the counter.  

I heard Mother move and I kicked off the counter.  I hid the sugar, which she found later and didn't even question its removal from the high shelf.  I still felt as though I had "won" something, but I have not eaten plain sugar out of a container since then.  Peanut butter? Yeah.  Biscoff cookie spread? A whole fucking jar in one sitting, and I'll do it again.  Cookie dough? To the point of stomach ache.  But not sugar.

Blind Drive Onward

My belief in free will versus determinism seems to fluctuate all the time, and the fluctuation isn’t really based on anything.  Maybe my moods or how I’m feeling.  I don’t lose sleep over it or anything, but I find even now there’s a phrase that really grinds my gears.  Not one that you’d think would matter to someone like me.  But when I hear it or read it it’s like nails on a chalkboard. 

“I didn’t have a choice.”

Bitch. Lol.  Even typing it makes me irrationally angry. 

I think most of the time, when someone says that, they mean “I felt like I didn’t have a choice.” I know that’s true for me, and usually these statements come about when someone is under duress or not able to make a ‘better’ decision.  It shouldn’t change the meaning so much, but it does. 

It transforms everything, actually.  When someone says they don’t have a choice, I want to shake them until their teeth rattle and show them all of the choices available to them--good, bad, and in between.  And yet if that same situation is turned into “I feel like I don’t have choices”...boy I get it, it resonates.

And that got me thinking if there was ever a time in my life where “I felt like I didn’t have a choice” didn’t cut it.  Was there a time in my life that I truly didn’t have a choice?  To be honest, the majority of childhood feels that way to me.  It wasn’t that I made the best choice available, it was more that I was forced into one way of being, and the other alternatives were death.  

Or felt like death.  Made me think death awaited.  Sometimes death was threatened.  I watched other youth die…although it usually took long enough that nobody connected their initial bad choice with the dying. 

I think part of being a kid is that you by nature don’t feel like your choices matter.  If it’s against the rules you’re going to be told no anyway.  Something like school sure as hell wasn’t a choice, but it slowly forms into a choice over time.  By the time I was in ninth grade and absolutely hated my typing teacher to the boundaries of the earth and back, I was choosing to drag my feet and not entirely skip class, but just not be there enough that I could end the suffering of being in her presence.  (She wasn’t that terrible in hindsight, but my teenage ADHD brain could not handle the subject or the classmates.)

I’ve always said that when I ran away from home, I didn’t have a choice.  I use those words very purposefully.  I made the choice over and over, honestly, and never had the guts to just do it.  I thought about it for years, agonized about it. Daydreamed.  I remember watching Forrest Gump and when Jenny prayed to be a bird to fly far away, that was kind of what I expected and thought would help. 

The tangible aspect of running away didn’t quite reach my mind yet--this was when I was about eleven or twelve.  Running away was an idea, it was more abstract.  I wanted to be like Oliver Twist, just yukking it up on the streets with the Artful Dodger.  Or more accurately, I wanted to be Pippi Longstockings, who just kind of farted around without an adult and made it work and was way cooler than her normie counterpart homies.  I didn’t want to die, which is surprising (those feelings came later, lol) I just wanted to not be there.

The abuse and violence escalated and I remember I almost ran away one night.  Everyone was asleep and I walked to our bathroom door which exited over a seven foot drop (there had been another room there, but it was torn down) and I opened the door, stepped on the ledge, and pulled the door closed.  I was in a nightgown, and barefoot.  I’d jumped off that ledge playing or just to get where I needed to go many times, and since I knew for sure that my parents were both asleep I doubted I would wake them up by falling. 

And I stood there, seeing the moonlight coming through the trees.  We were planning to go to Riverbend the next day (I think planning for that trip was what triggered Dad’s autistic meltdown earlier that day which saw me getting beat and screamed at for hours) and despite the violence, I could feel and sense the excitement of my family in the other room.  Mom and Ariel very seldom got any chances to do fun things like this, and I remember wondering while I stood out there if me running away meant that they would cancel the trip.  What a conundrum, haha.  I had no plans of where to go, but since I lived in the woods I was pretty sure I could deal with whatever.  (I’m still sure that I could have.  I was a fucking badass kid.)

When I turned away from the open edge of the house and the moonlight and back toward that prison of a house I was sobbing.  Silently, but still sobbing.  I stayed awake for hours just crying, knowing that my sanity was going to be ground down further because the moment that my adrenaline was high enough to actually do the crazy stupid ridiculous thing that would help me, my love and concern for my family told me to stop.  And I listened.  

And you know?  Riverbend was pretty fun, all things considered.  It made me feel wonderful to see everyone having so much fun.  I felt like I'd chosen correctly.

And the violence escalated.

When I did leave, you could argue that my parents would never have actually killed me…that I still had a choice and made it.  But I don’t see it that way.  I had no agency and there was not a single part of my life that I had adequate control of.  The torture and threats of more torture were clear enough that my overloaded brain correctly propelled my body the FUCK out of there that same night.  I’ll say forever, I didn’t have a choice.  I felt no courage.  Fighting for your life isn't courage, it's a fucking involuntary thing where something inside you (your Richard Parker) comes out and takes charge and you have zero input about it.

The interesting thing is, what happens when you’re an adult? Like, when does choice start?  I have done a lot of weird, pointless, stupid, cringey things as an adult that I know were just bad choices.  Some of them felt like they weren't choices at the time.  And that’s what trauma and ADHD does.  When you feel the urge to flee or fight or fuck or some other self-preservation thing, you just pluck up and do it without much thought, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Some things that I did felt like addictions I was unable to stop--the epitome of not having a choice.  Someone else in the driver’s seat, calling the shots.  And yet whoever was in that driver's seat was absolutely not a Richard Parker.  The fight for my life was not ON in the same way it had been when I was a child.

So for my adult "felt like I didn't have a choice" choices, I still maintain the vibe that I made those choices.  I take responsibility for my parts, and don’t take responsibility for the bullshit that isn’t mine.  I forgive myself for whatever self-sabotage I come up with and just try to keep being better.  I don’t think in adulthood I have ever had such an intense, life-changing moment where I “Didn’t have a choice.” 

It’s hard to hear people who won’t leave marriages or won’t change jobs or won’t do this or that thing because they “Don’t have a choice.”  The stupid trigger that made me post this whole ponderation was someone saying they didn’t have a choice to give someone in their family a house key.  Like bro, that’s always a choice, it’s your FUCKING HOUSE.  But again, under duress….did she feel that survivor’s panic? What do I know about her trauma?  Why do I care either way?  Why does one just irritate the absolute hell out of me?

Part of my psychology is wanting to see people be at their best, and maybe getting a little drill-sergeanty when I can see their best and they’re not at it.  The problem with this is of course that I have absolutely no say in the reality of their best, and that I’m very good at putting character traits and colorful narratives onto people I know, turning them into CHAMPIONS to be molded.  I might just write too much fiction, I don’t know.  I really can intuit things about people that they themselves see or want, or things they want to change, but my brain takes those seeds and runs with them into "if you wanted to, you could ______. WITH MY HELP, WE CAN GET THERE EVEN FASTER.  I'VE GOT YOU."  (I am insufferable.)

I always maintain that people do what they’re capable of, and usually not much more.  To see growth and transformation and change especially after generational trauma is a lot to hope for, and I acknowledge that people never get there and that’s okay.  They’re still cool either way.  When people start with “I had no choice” I feel that they are speaking their truth.  Whether or not I agree.  So I have thus far not slapped anyone yet for using the words that make parts of me cringe.

A dark and cynical part of me wonders if it has something to do with courage.  Courage may just mean making choices when things are shitty, and owning those choices.  And not having a choice, instead acting on pressure or doing what you’re told, is the loss of or absence of courage.  So your boss tells you to work extra and you don’t tell him to eat shit--you may feel like you don’t have a choice, but what you really don’t have is courage. 

Is that a thing?  Is it awful to say that this applies to things like abused spouses…?  Or someone trying to overcome addiction?  The thing is, when people talk about getting out of those bad situations the sensations and mindspace they describe has nothing to do with courage.  It's the tiger.  Tigers are killing machines, they don't really have courage.  I don't think a peak predator needs something like that.  They have other things.  

 And in making these big, terrifying changes, the courage usually comes after.  It's when you really commit to the choice and work through it.  You know, after the adrenaline wears off and you're still trying.  That is the part that involves courage, and it almost always involves choices.  I feel like if someone is TRYING to fix their situation then they are trying to find that choice, thus they must have some courage they're also trying to find.  Me standing at the door that night was me coming nose to nose with my own courage, and the choice I made to neglect it was what made me so fucking sad.  

In short I guess, my concept of courage has nothing to do with survival-instinct reaction.  It has everything to do with choices that are going to have some shitty side effects, and wading through them.  Sometimes 'I had no choice' sounds like a cop-out to me and I want to see people stand up for themselves.  Which is silly, and I do nothing to encourage this behavior.  I just stew on in internally while saying something dumb like "I'm here for you, whatever you need."  It's their life.

For me becoming an adult was the best fucking thing I ever experienced.  I know people wax nostalgic about childhood and I promise, I do as well--I tell happy stories from my childhood all the time.  But I always knew, DEEP in my soul that things would change for me when I grew up.  I would not listen to any more dipshit soul-sucking idiotic adults who thought they knew what was best for me and knew nothing about me.  The absolutely wild thing about that is how right I was.  

Here I sit, 35, a parent, and I can honestly say that the vast majority of adults “caring” for me were incompetent at best.  That is INSANE to think about.  If I went back in time and appeared next to eight year old Alex, doodling Mike Nesmith and said “Listen, your spite for anyone over age 30 is SO warranted, don’t trust these jackasses farther than you can throw them because they don’t know anything about you and only want to control you, they think far less of you than your true worth” …like I’d be dumbfounded.  And depressed.  Also vindicated.  We’re all manipulated into thinking that adults just know something we don’t as children.  LIES.  Big, dumb, stupid, boomer lie culture. 

So yeah, my only experience with not having a choice was right on the cusp of my entrance to adulthood, when my parents seemed to sense that they were losing control of me (and my respect) and they put me in a position where my survival felt threatened.  The hazy earlier memories of childhood also involved a lot of powerless moments and not having choices, but adulthood really changed gears for me. 

It’s odd to hear people who are adults say they don’t have choices.  I guess that’s all.  

 I'll end with another quote about choices, from Randall Clark's last journal entry:

"Maybe the only point of all this living was to keep those pictures in my head going for as long as I could...It wasn't choice. I chose to die again and again. Just never did. Body had its own drive.

Well, the little ones will need it. Species will need it if it's to continue. That blind drive onward.'

Friendship Formulas

I know, somewhere in my head, that knowledge gained throughout life doesn’t go in a steady upward trajectory.  But also, it kind of does, and I’ve never dealt with having applied knowledge and not gotten results that I understood.  You know, even if a choice is dumb or bad, you kind of know what your consequences will be.  Even if it's just in hindsight.  

If you’re trying to better yourself or improve something and you apply what you know, and the result is a failure, well that’s a real head scratcher.  But what if you’d already learned the lesson you’re trying to apply?

I figure this rant needs some backstory.  

I went through a period of time in my twenties where I was deeply, deeply misanthropic.  I attributed all bad qualities to humans and no good ones.  At all. This hatred included myself, and thus the whole suicidal ideation that lasted for years thing.  Anyway, during this time, I believed that friends were not real.  A temporary comfort, a swinging bridge over the treacherous waters that would give out the MOMENT you leaned into it.  I thought that I was truly alone in the world, a singular hopeless idiotic entity drifting in a sea of likewise dead idiots.  Very enlightened, you know. 

I didn’t trust the friends that I had, and would always apply the “expect the worst, and be pleasantly surprised” trope to any positive interaction with people.  It’s funny, because I’m still friends with a lot of people I met during this time in my life and I have absolutely no idea how.  I was so insufferable and grouchy.  And would take any opportunity to lecture them about how meaningless all of this was.  Just everything.  

So that was me back then.  I remember I would always quote that Dr. Seuss line “Alone! All alone, whether you like it or not, alone is something you’ll be quite a lot” in literally any situation which might have had a connotation of someone letting someone else down.  I was not very comforting, and probably still am not. (If you’re familiar with the enneagram, these traits of an eight are pretty textbook, something I didn’t know at the time.) 

Then came the growth and healing.  Speaking of the Enneagram, I contribute a lot of my ‘movement’ or direction/trajectory of growth (on this topic) toward this modality.  That might make me seem insincere or autistic, but hear me out.  I had expanded my brain and my knowledge and my body and health, and traveled the world and did all this shit that I thought would make me feel more ‘complete’, and nothing did.  I had hit some sort of weird self-improvement ceiling, (wow much boast) and was lost on how to continue healing, until I found the Enneagram.  Per that modality, I’m a “Challenger” whose deepest fear is of being controlled (absolutely) and whose defining character trait is to be obtusely, angrily defiant of any sort of control (it is.)  

The prescription of growth for my kind? Be more like the “Helper.”  Due to all the trauma and forced independence and witnessed cruelty in my life, I’ve shut myself away from the world and given them fragments of me.  I’ve never been vulnerable enough to truly care about people, or show them the best, warmest parts of myself.  That all checks out, because fuck that.  Who on earth growing up in my position would be good at that? (And yet my sister does it pretty well, but that’s the fascinating thing about people I guess.)  I’m great at advocating for and taking care of the ‘innocent’ -- animals, children, basically anyone non-threatening -- but have a very difficult time accepting a position of vulnerability to any other normal human.  Just ask my husband, I found the very thought abhorrent for years of our relationship.  

Somehow this revolting and yet appropriate suggestion to open up and be better, moved me.  I talked to my therapist about it--therapists are always wanting people to open themselves up for love and grace and support and all that.  In a healthy way, of course. See, there’s my problem, I don’t fucking know how to do that in a healthy way.  I loved my parents the best I could and they SUCKED.  Being vulnerable around them was like sleeping with cobras.  Just generally a stupid idea so I didn't do it.  

Also, I’m a lot of things, but I’m not manipulative.  I’ve seen and heard and felt the effects of people who were “kind” just to get something or manipulate another person, and it’s the farthest thing from my mind.  I’d rather people just openly hate me than try to exchange me kissing their ass for them shaking my hand. Or vice versa.  Just hate me, it helps for my villain backstory.  

But my point is, it was time in my healing journey to EXPAND.  To stop shielding myself.  And all that.  So I consciously began being a better friend, or trying my hardest to.  It’s kind of hard to reflect on that and see if I did any sort of good job because the fucking shit disaster of 2020 wrecked everything and any hard work or bonds made up until that point were kind of rocked by the mother of all ender of friendships/relationships. 

To catch up on all this, I find myself sitting here in 2022 pondering why my friendships feel worse than they ever have.  Some are just…gone?  Others are lacking authenticity or something (see, I can’t even articulate the issue.)  Things feel fake, or forced, or hollow.  I’m not great at explaining these things because I just intuit everything and this has been an intuitive assumption.  Does that make me a jackass? Maybe.  It’s part of my experience so I’ll defend it to the end.  But I also wouldn’t like, defend it objectively in a court of law.  It makes me emotional and I try hard to separate my emotions from the things that have happened.  Both suck. I hate both.  (Me, younger, cheering in the back of my head at the hint of a return to misanthropy) 

So, I feel that way, and it sucks.  I can also hear 22 year old Alex in my head starting the “All alone!” verse.  I just want to go shhhh, we’re older than this now, and cynicism has no place in maturity.  

Which is true, but also, why do I feel this way?  

Years ago I was involved in pinup, and from the moment the idea was handed to me and I pursued it, excited about how great it was--I was totally bummed out when not only did I not make friendships and have the girl power promised by all the local and national cliques of these people--I actually felt like how I felt at my home and foster homes.  Sleeping with a bunch of fucking cobras.  There were some unsavory happenings in that crowd.  

It wasn’t just me that noticed them either, just in case you think I’m some delusional paranoid still-cynical asshole.  The toxicity is also talked about, and Allyn saw it firsthand and did not enjoy. I tried really, really hard to make friends and be genuine (I am always genuine, I can’t help it and wouldn’t if I could.) And I ended up with a few friends on the outer circles of the friendship solar system.  They kind of disappeared when I stopped going to those degrading as fuck pinup contests full of cobras.

That group has kind of been the model for whatever I found myself interested in socially.  I think around the same time I was doing pinup I attempted cosplay and absolutely did not like it HAHA. The feeling was not much better.  The drama was extreme, the toxicity blatant.  I wasn’t really trying to do anything with wasteland other than hang out with other people who liked apocalyptic stuff, but by the time I got around to drag in 2022 I knew that a part of my journey and endeavor was to connect with people.  To make them a part of my life in a genuine and organic way.  

And yet those two by all means most recent endeavors still kind of leave me lonely and stumped.  (All alone! I hear echoing in my head.  She has a point.)  How did I end up here, where my goal was to grow and meet others and have healing relationships, and yet back in my disgusted, depressed, ‘go fuck yourself, I don’t need you’ days I made all of the lasting friendships? What, and why, and how?

I should say with all of these groups and thoughts, I’m not blaming others.  I don’t know that a place exists to put the blame.  I know that when I was young and stupid, my friends were my life.  That’s kind of how poverty class mindedness is…your gold, your valuables, are in the deep forged bonds of the created family.  A lot of these friendships were lifesaving, and so what if they were trauma bonded? It worked didn’t it?  

Anyway, what I notice now that I’m one of these middle class parent idiots is that the trauma-family has disappeared.  Everyone already has their own, and what we get as friends seems to be some outer concentric circle in aforementioned relationship solar system.  We don't need those closer bonds.  The people I've met later in life, they don’t need someone like me who will pick up a baseball bat and be at their ex’s house at 2am.  They don’t need someone to go on long night time drives with, ranting about the course of life.  They don’t need to be vulnerable with me.  

And my perspective is that I do need those things, I want them in my friendships.  If I’m going to be friends with someone, we are gonna be a fucking PAIR, BOYO.  I love my close friends, love hanging out with them and knowing that they know me, I know them, and we can fuck some serious shit up together as a fucking TEAM whether that's creating something, people watching, or just grocery shopping.  It's done with love and heart and feeling.  That is how fucking exhausting I am.

But to me, there’s nothing more depressing than meeting someone fascinating and then seeing that they only want to small talk with me.  They don’t want to do the deep, close, friendship stuff.  I have so many “lukewarm” friends that I’m drowning in them, drowning in a sea of “hope you’re well!” and “cute pics” and I'm d y i n g.  You know how it feels when someone close to you dies, and everyone is SO CONCERNED for a minute and then the minute they forget about it you're alone?  I've felt that, resoundingly, since my dad did actually die.  

I'm not saying my friends were shitty to me about that.  Not at all. I'm just saying, the empty echo left by covid (Dad died in 2020) feels almost like a shockwave that I'm still deaf from.  Where did everybody go?  They were all there just before the lockdown.  I swear they were.  They're gone.  Also I can't hear.  And might be radioactive.  

Is this a me problem?  Yeah, for sure. 

But also, I’m genuinely curious about what the hell is happening.  

I suspect a large part of it is that the friends I’m trying to make either don’t have a need for more deep, close, personal friendships (because they already had them before we met) or it’s a poverty class thing that all my middle class friends have no experience with.  Some of them seem unfamiliar with the concept and seem to think I’m the person to small talk with, 24-7 365. I try not to pry or push, but that’s the problem…a lot of me making friends is me trying very hard to get past this “oh wow you are such a cool person! Thanks for being so cool! Byeeeyeee!” Man, I don't care.  Please tell me ten stories from your life that are embarrassing and please listen to me do the same.  While we drive through Echo Canyon and run from the zombies that live in those creepy houses and then sit by the train tracks to hear the train horn, because it's the spookiest and coolest thing ever.  

Then I wonder,.is this a thing where millennials, all traumatized beyond belief and forced to deal with the absolute bullshit hand we’ve been given, just have too much on their plate for deep friendships?  Maybe they are only comfortable with small talk, and I'm the pushy overbearing autist.  Or, even better, am I ahead of the curve in healing, and on my own out here just being open and trusting while everybody else thinks everyone else are cobras? IS IT THEIR TRAUMA?  

How long can I tap dance across the diagnosis of autism before something goes into my shoe?  Just kidding.  Well, mostly.  I have autistic family members and have studied long and hard--I’m not anywhere on the spectrum deserving of a diagnosis, but this recent social conundrum has me questioning myself.  Maybe things are normal and fine, and my deep sense of unrest and intuitive sadness and loneliness is just some autistic socialization issue.  Maybe I'm the freak and the alien and they're genuinely happy with the state of our friendship while I writhe in pain of "something is off."  

I’m not quite sure what to think.  All I know is that it feels really stupid to be 35 years old and wondering how I got “making friends” wrong.  

I can’t morph into my 22 year old mindset, I can look back on it like reading an old familiar book.  I remember how it felt to think of others as dangerous, selfish, greedy.  I still think that about plenty of people, most of them in power at the moment.  But even though I feel this deep sense of rejection and loneliness, I don’t have that bitterness anymore.  It’s more sadness (I’m not sure it’s much better, but it at least feels like what older people do, so that’s something.)  

Sadness and confusion.  I’m like a scorned puppy, but probably less pathetic.  

I don’t know, I felt pretty pathetic the night I injured my eye.  Every time I look in a mirror and see my iris off, or my pupil extra dilated, I feel that sadness and confusion times a million. Like it’s somehow my fault, that if I had known the perfect recipe to make deeper friendships, I could have avoided the whole situation leading up to that stupid accident.  None of that makes any sense, but I believe in just listening to how I feel and not shutting it up.  Lots of the last two months of 2022 have been moments of me just staring in a mirror with the most pathetic heartbroken expression on earth.  

I think that’s the part that people don’t get.  Even those members of my chosen family, who are great at listening to and understanding my emotions most of the time. They see me being sad over my eye and immediately move to cheer me up -- Hey you avoided vision loss!  You had the worst/best luck ever!  Your eye looks great! Similar things to the things I also tell myself all the time, but missing the point.  

I don’t think the sadness comes from almost losing an eye or from the trauma of that night.  I don’t care about that.  I was in a self destructive mood because my intuitive “something is off” was raised that entire week prior and I probably wouldn’t have ended up hurt if I’d done anything differently.  If I had known how to do anything differently.  I don’t know what parts of myself are involved in these feelings, but it’s likely a lot of it is inner child stuff simply because both this profound confusion and “ow, I am hurt, why am I hurt, what did I do?” feel very familiar to being a child.  

I often look in the mirror and think to my eye (and by extension, the rest of my body) I am so fucking sorry for letting you down.  I am so sorry you got hurt.  That should never have happened to you, and I am an irresponsible dumbass for not navigating through that in a better way.  I didn't keep you safe, I failed.  

Feeling those feelings brings out a deep and overwhelming sadness that has nothing to do with the bright side of the situation.  It feels like a personal betrayal, and it feels like I am not a safe person with my own self.  Like I don’t know what I am doing (I mean, clearly I don’t, but also in ways I’m pretty good at keeping myself safe.  It’s like my one redeeming quality and something I pride myself in greatly.) 

I also know, I have no other way of navigating through anything--it all comes down to doing what you know, and acting on the knowledge and information that you have available.  I don’t think in hindsight there was anything I could have done.  I am so far still incapable of Vulcan mind-melding to people so that they know how I feel.  And that’s what it would take.  It’s not normal to sit people down and tell them that you feel a vast chasm of emptiness where you’d like a friendship to be, and see how that makes them feel.  

It’s never been said to me, and so I guess I expect that when I say it to another person, they will see me as a lunatic (not the most dramatic reason people have seen me that way, but I digress.)  There’s absolutely no way to say it without it sounding accusatory, and this entire blog probably sounds accusatory even though I’ve already said…I blame no one.  There’s also no way to say it without putting in motion some strange series of events which would never happen otherwise--to me, it feels like putting a meter or a gauge on a relationship and it’s awful.  I cringe into a trapezoid when I think about broaching this subject at all.  It's impossible and I quit.  

I would have never said, prior to 2022, that I’m bad at making friends.  I think most people who know me would call me social in multiple ways, and say that I have my charm.  I also truly enjoy getting to know people and find them fascinating, so even if I don’t connect in the usual way, my interest is always shown.  (Again--I can’t help it.)  There are so many amazing conversations and settings I've been in that make me think I'm not socially broken.  

I think there’s something to be said for authenticity as well, in one form or another I’m always pretty….me.  My friends know I am wordy, I ponder about things deeply, I look for symbolism, I characterize people in a way that inspires admiration of their individuality.  Those are just ways I am, not things I choose to be.  The choosing part was choosing to put myself out there as it were, and try to connect more deeply than before. 

But 2022 taught me, dumb choice, bad wrong don't do that again. 

I've thought about the possibility that I'm just sad for old times in my life, the freedom to be friends first and not have a family to worry about. But I don't think that's the case here. I have spent time with those in my innermost orbit even just this year, and every time I spent time with my deep friends--all of us with our old people lives and our families and crap--it felt the way it always has. True, and real. Then I try to make the other relationships into any semblance of that feeling and I fail. So I don't think this is a "nostalgia" thing. I'm very privileged in that, if someone said "let's tear some shit up this Saturday" I could probably free up my schedule without leaving my son with a convict named Lefty (this is what happened to me when my parents had friendship obligations. No hate--Lefty was fantastic. Taught me how to tattoo. I was four, so the skill went undeveloped.)

One shit lesson from foster care that I cherish deeply is how to love people and let them go.  I had to let go of so many friends unwillingly that I'm pretty good (maybe too good?) at saying "ah yes, we are now separate. I love and value you as a person and wish that things could have been different."  It's a huge grieving process that I really wish I didn't feel like I have to go through, but I've had to. So I know what it feels like. I can say that when I look back at friendships that I don't understand or couldn't salvage, I still wholly love those people.  Sometimes I feel like the leaving or tearing away will literally kill me.  It hasn't so far, but eh we'll see.  It might be that, or fungal meningitis.  I'm telling you, if fungus ever decides our time is up we are DEAD. AS. FUCK.  

While it’s really fucking annoying to not have answers here, I remain curious about how to proceed, and what the actual formula for forging deep friendships will be in my future.  And I love all my friends, just like how Anthony Kiedis sings about with his shirt off.