Good morning folks. I am going to drop my usual “morning friends” business but I will talk about that a bit later. First off I am failing you because the well has officially run dry. I made it through twenty mixtapes for MixTape Mondays, before ultimate running out of juice. You can always view the archives here, but I am uncertain if or when this series is going to return. It was a pretty good run and I am fairly proud of some of the blends of music that I presented, but also more or less out of creative juice when it comes to music. That said it still serves as one of my longest-running series, so I guess there is that.
Instead this morning I am going to talk a bit about the nature of friendship and the internet. I had something happen yesterday that once again reminded me that internet relations are not necessarily guaranteed to be a two-way street. More specifically this is referred to as “Parasocial Relationships” and I have even blogged about this construct before in the past. However I myself just allowed myself to get bit by that and I feel this mixture of stupidity, shame, and sadness. This is not a drama blog, so I am not going to go into details… because quite honestly they are pretty boring. Ultimately it was someone I tried to be friends with and has once again shown me that I am not really in that group for them.
I am a pretty simple monkey as far as monkeys go. I use the word “friend” pretty liberally, and start off posts with “morning friends” because quite honestly if you are here on the regular it seems like you are at least interested in me as a human being. I’ve never stuck to a single topic long enough to really be a “theme” blogger, even though this blog once upon a time started off that way. Sure when I am on a Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft bender… this becomes a blog where I almost exclusively talk about that one thing. However, if you are going to stick around for more than a few articles here or there, my assumption is that you at least on some level care about me as a human being. If that is the case I count you as a friend, which is a term with a lot of gradation to it.
I try to meet everyone with the possibility of making a brand new lifelong friend. I grew up as an only child and worse… an only child living out in the country separated by any possibility for neighbor children to play with. I wanted nothing more than a sibling, but that never came to fruition so while I spent copious amounts of time entertaining myself… I always wanted to be able to hang out with another human being. Granted I am very BAD at doing so because oftentimes my idea of that is “you go do whatever you want to do, and I will do whatever I want to do… but we will technically be inhabiting the same space”. After years of fining that entertaining myself skill, I am usually off doing my own thing but can be summoned forth for shenanigans at a moment’s notice.
This also means that I often cast a pretty wide net when it comes to trying to invite people into my world. Where I fail miserably as a human being, is that because I am constantly inviting people into my “monkeysphere“… I am usually doing a pretty shit job of checking in on the people who are already there. This is especially true when more recently I have been in a bit of a funk and I am trying desperately not to fall into one. That means I have reverted into a “speak when spoken to” sort of mode when it comes to human interactions. I’ve kept my head down and focused on my dumb objective of getting everything to level 80 in Final Fantasy XIV and also planning a bit for New World, but otherwise been fairly oblivious to the world around me.
I have no idea what necessarily I did to make me unworthy of friendship, but I also don’t necessarily have to know. People gotta do whatever is best for themselves, and that is true even if it means that I can’t be part of that adventure. I am not a great friend. I know this. I keep putting myself out there but once I have made that first contact and invited people into my madness… the whole only-child thing kicks in and I have no fucking idea whatsoever to do with them once I have roped them in. Often times it is a situation of exhausting myself of social energy just in working up the moxie to make that first contact, that I have none left for when they shockingly seem interested. That doesn’t mean I am going to stop trying, however, and I do have a group of folks who have managed to put up with my bullshit for long enough that they are permanent fixtures of my world. I guess I am just constantly searching for more people who might also be “drift compatible”.
So mostly this morning’s post is being melancholic, at least trying to get it out of my system. That said I also think it is important that you the reader understand that when I am using the word friend in a blog post I am being sincere… or at least as sincere as I know how to be. I am a deeply flawed human being, but this isn’t some marketing ploy to get you to subscribe to my pyramid scheme… although when I go into recruiting for a new game it very much DOES start to seem like a sales pitch. Ultimately I seek connections because I don’t really want to be alone, even if I have no clue how to actually be the sort of friend that normal human beings are. I wish I did not allow the actions of others, that I have zero control over… to deflate the wind from my sails but I guess that is also part of being me as well. I get my hopes up and also get them dashed… sometimes without anyone realizing they actually did it. I’ve made it to forty-five and am not sure if I know another way to exist.
If you’ve made it this far in the post, I salute you. I probably would have stopped reading several paragraphs ago. I hope you all have a great week and hopefully tomorrow I will return to my regularly scheduled nonsense. Today however I had to be a bit sad over something I have no real right to be sad about. My blog is oftentimes how I work through things, and hopefully, after making this post I can toss some topsoil over it and be done with it for a while.
Appreciative Fist Bump It’s latish in the UK so writing a long diatribe on friendship and the human condition I’ll save for a re-watch of The Wrath of Khan. But as mentioned above the human element is always more inviting. Builds a picture and makes a less personal review more the richer (for me anyway).
Holy smokes we are similar in so many ways and different in so many others.
I do have a sibling, but he is 10 years older than me and he and his big-brain left for college at 16 (so I was 6) and never came back, so I was effectively an only child. Like you, no other kids in the neighborhood. I’m old enough that latch-key kids were common, so by the time I was 11 or 12 I’d come home from school and be at home alone until the parents got home around 6. So like you, I entertained myself. My best friends at the time were the cast of Gilligan’s Island which was always on in re-runs after school. When I WAS around other kids I didn’t really know how to behave. I was OK at school (except recess) since there was structure but free-form stuff? I just did my own thing. It didn’t help that I was a fat kid so sports and I didn’t get along too well, unless it was football where I could just use my mass to push other kids out of the way.
But I am totally unlike you in that, these days, I really struggle to reach out to even try to make friends or bring people into my monkeysphere. (Love that link, btw, so thanks for sharing.) This week I have joined a Discord full of people I don’t know and every few hours I have to fight the urge to remove myself from it because these people all seem really weird and alien to me. (It also probably doesn’t help that I am, I would guess, 20+ years older than the oldest of them). Also as you know I am thin-skinned to the point were I am basically sheathed in tissue paper.
So for me “Ultimately I seek connections because I don’t really want to be alone, even if I have no clue how to actually be the sort of friend that normal human beings are.” is true except it would be more like “I wish someone would come and find me because I don’t really want to be alone, even if I have no clue how to actually be the sort of friend that normal human beings are.”
And when someone does come and find me, I usually run away after a few minutes, then breathe a sigh of relief when that person gives up on me. Then go back to feeling lonely.
What I end up doing is brag about what an Introvert and lone-wolf I am and how I don’t need friends. All of which is complete BS of course. Or maybe not, I’ve gotten through 6 decades of being like this.
Actually that too is a lie. I went through a period in my 20s where I was really social and arguably popular. A lot of that had to do with the industry I was in (restaurants and bars) which kind of forced me to be social (being introverted and tending bar at the local pub don’t really mix). Plus there was a non-trivial amount of alcohol involved. But I KNOW what it felt like to be seen and to be in a group so I know what I’m missing which kind of makes things worse in a way.
I’m not sure I have a point, I just wanted to share and let you know that you’re not alone in feeling… different. I don’t really throw the friend word around like you do. I don’t think I actually have any friends, other than my partner. But even though you and I have had our rough patches, I certainly do care about you and I keep coming back around to spend time in your monkeysphere, and to me that counts as something. Hope it does to you as well.
The latchkey thing rings true, because while I was not necessarily one… I opted to stay home alone at any point I could. I was that kid who would ask to stay in the car and read or draw or whatever instead of going into the store. I will try and reach out and convince you to do things more often. I think for me I default to “if someone needs me they will tell me” mode a little too often. When maybe I should be spending a bit more time checking in on people to see if they need or want to do something. That takes a lot of “spoons” at time, but it is a thing I wish I was better at doing.
I consider you to be my friend, and I do genuinely care about you as a human being. I look forward to seeing your commentary wash across my twitter. I don’t always respond because I fight with feeling like I am being a pest and entering conversations where I am not wanted.
Not that I want you to feel bad to do it, but as a regular reader I like it when you veer off the gaming path and talk about stuff that’s going on in your life. I feel like over the years a lot of bloggers I follow, most of whom used to write almost entirely about games and related hobbies, have slowly moved to include more and more personal material and the relationships involved can only be stronger for it.
I had a whole lot of things to say based on your post but four long paragraphs into a reply I realized I probably ought to turn it into a post of my own. The gist of it is going to be that how humans communicate has changed out of all recognition but we haven’t yet developed the language to describe it, so misunderstandings are inevitable. In the end, almost everything comes down to language. “Friend” is a weighted word that already causes no end of problems even in physical spaces. It’s no surprise it carries an extra payload in digitized form.
I’ll leave it at that or else it’s going to defeat the object of not putting everything in a comment. I hope you feel less sad later, having written about it.
I greatly look forward to reading the thing that was going to be a comment 🙂 I always appreciate your comments and I appreciate knowing you are out there. I don’t think you blog for over a decade without breaking down some of the walls. What limited walls I have maintained I do so only to provide minimum protection for my wife who is also very online at times.