Missing the obvious

Or, I was never meant to be like everyone else.

One of the life truths I’ve believed is that we get the lessons we need, repeatedly, until we learn them. Figuring out what the learning is, is the real battle.

Friendships and social relationships are something I’ve struggled with my whole life. Until recently, I viewed it under this light; that there is a lesson there in how to make and keep friends that I just haven’t learned yet. This is not to say I haven’t had friends, because I have.

As a kid, I remember being worried about this before starting my first year of school. I asked how to make friends. My mother told me at the time, “just ask someone if they want to be your friend, it’ll be fine.” I was sceptical because this didn’t seem at all like something people did, but apparently, I applied it on the very first day. Apparently, I say, because I have no memory of it, but the friend involved says I did.

Adult relationships are more complicated. Most of my adult long-term, close relationships feel like they happened by accident. I’ve always felt a bit like my friends adopted me. In the periods in between, the lulls of friendship as life cycles and seasons pass, and friends change, I’ve always wondered how to go about finding more. I rarely have more than two “best” friends at any time. I don’t need to be super popular, and in fact, probably wouldn’t like it. I would like, however, to feel like I add value to someone else’s life.

I have spent most of my adult life trying to figure out this friendship thing. I’ve found I’m not bad at bringing groups of people together. As a kid, this started as an in-person thing (that was before the internet) and since then it’s been largely virtual. Not hoards of people, but I’ll notice other people wanting a group of like-minded people, and create said group because I know how to do that! I can facilitate other people meeting each other and making friends. Part of the reason I’ve done this, repeatedly, has been in the hopes of finding stronger relationships, myself. That part hasn’t really worked.

It came to me not that long ago that perhaps I’m trying to learn the wrong lesson. All this time I figured that this lesson was about how to make and keep friends, and once I’d conquered that, I’d be sorted. Maybe, instead, my lesson is how to live without needing friends for fulfilment.

The psychiatrist I saw reckoned my main problem was anxiety around social situations, but I don’t think that’s quite it. His advice was that I need to feel the fear and do it anyway. What he doesn’t understand is that that’s what I’ve done my whole life. Yes, I have anxiety around it, but I still do it, because that’s what people tell me works. When it then doesn’t work, that causes more anxiety and triggers a strong sense of rejection as well. If instead, I learn to just be okay within myself, maybe that’s the true answer here. He saw my wanting to be included as a sign against me being autistic. I disagreed then, and do now as well. I think to some extent, everyone wants to be included. Just some of us don’t know how to do that.

Ironically, maybe he was onto something after all. If I worked to get to a place where I was fine without close friendships, that would certainly cause me less anxiety around wanting them.

I am an NPC

I identify as a Xennial.  The first 12 years of my life were entirely “offline”; I remember a time before the wireless home phone, and although we didn’t have one in our house, I have used a rotary phone on multiple occasions.  

When I was 12, however, we got our first internet capable computer, a PowerMac.  It came preloaded with eWorld, which at the time was an online service provider exclusive to their subscribers (the service of which was charged on a per-minute basis).  

What this means is that I remember a time “before” the Internet (certainly before how we know it now) but also, all of my teen years were influenced by what I found online. 

What, then, did I find online?  

Amidst all the fear mongering about this “dangerous new world” inhabited by “predators and axe murderers”, I found honest, kind, and open-minded people.  Although I occasionally dabbled in the “teen” chat rooms, I had very little patience for the constant streams of “a/s/l” or the inane, repetitive, and meaningless chatter that filled those spaces.  Instead, I stumbled into spaces aimed at adults.  Not in the creepy, “adult only” context, but merely, spaces created by adults and generally aimed at similar adult conversation. 

And I loved it.  People immediately accepted me, and it never occurred to me to either obscure or lie about my age.  Yet, I participated in the conversation, sometimes lurking more than chatting, sometimes participating equally.  I found groups like Women Online Worldwide that was made up of women of all ages, all across the globe, gathering together in online spaces simply designed to chat about topics we have in common.  I found spaces aimed for encouraging the creatives; writer’s groups that posted weekly topics and allowed us to imagine, create, and cultivate our talent.  

Online, I found endless spaces that accepted me simply for who I was.  In real life, I was battling the constant dance of trying to fit in but always failing.  I was trying to craft my personality to be accepted, and yet only falling short and being further rejected.  Online, I just “was”, in a way I had never before experienced.  

When I was 13, my mother and I traveled across the United States, exclusively for the purpose of meeting, individually, many of the people with whom we’d been talking for the past year or so.  Before we ever met them in person, in many cases we’d arranged to stay overnight at their houses before traveling on to the next leg.  We met over twenty different people, in multiple states, during that trip.  No experiences were negative, and we only had two no-shows.  It came at a time after I’d been white-knuckling my way through middle-school, and had yet to move on to the bigger sea of high school, where I did eventually find my own little group of other oddballs like me. This trip helped to restore my faith in humanity.  Yes, there are bad people in the world, and yes, some of them can be found online as easily as offline.  Yet we’d managed to find endless examples of the good, and that helped to colour how I’ve gone on to see the world. 

Eventually I found my husband online too.  That was somewhat of a happy accident.  

Years later, after moving from California to New Zealand to be with said now-husband, I found myself pregnant with my first child and mystified about what to expect, with very little in-person help or contacts.  I hadn’t yet made any close friends in person.  The friends I did have were online, and largely in the USA.  

Instead, I found another space online.  At the time this was aimed at people using cloth nappies on their babies, and it featured a forum where people talked a little about nappies and a lot about everything else.  Suddenly, I had another space where I was welcomed and accepted.  Even better, this space was specifically aimed at Kiwis, and had regular meetups (“nappicinos”) in varying cities, including the one in which I was living.  Suddenly I had a best friend again, and a large circle of other close friends.  We’d met online initially, but that carried over into “real life” for an even stronger bond.  

Online spaces, now, are different to how they used to be. Instead of being a niche environment that only a select group of people had access to, “the internet” has, for the most part, become merely an extension of real life.  The fact that Facebook is populated primarily with pictures of actual people instead of avatars is a defining characteristic of this change.  While that has taken away a layer of anonymity that was constantly accused of allowing bullies to flourish, it also has recreated the superficial ways in which people instinctively label and judge others.  Also, spoiler alert, but there’s still plenty of bullies that don’t mind so much if they’re anonymous or not.  That’s just the nature of bullies. 

Maybe it’s just a product of getting older, but it seems so much harder lately to find “my people” online than it used to be.  Maybe some of the inherent belief I had that people are generally good has been rubbed away by the daily realities of life.  Maybe it’s the added struggle of being already pre-grouped by things like my age, location, and who I know that makes it harder to break out of these assumed norms.  Maybe it’s none of these things. Either way, online spaces suddenly feel far more like real life than they ever did, and as such, it is harder for a socially awkward, rather isolated person to find a niche in.