Last night I went to a ’social media party’ and became acutely aware of the fact that I suffer from Social Anxiety Disorder. I stood in the middle of the Grand Hyatt with my glass of wine and looked around anxiously, trying to find someone to talk to but not really wanting to talk to anyone anyway. I don’t know how to be normal in large groups of strangers. I can never come up with the right thing to say; I can never come up with anything to say. Sometimes I wish that when you met people, the culturally polite thing to do would be to give them a hug. I think we would all feel more relaxed in social situations if conversations began just after we threw our arms around each other.
After the party I felt kind of sad and really needed a hug, so Jeff came over and gave me one on the sidewalk a few houses down from mine while I wasn’t wearing any shoes. We talked about how everyone here is so nice, and how sometimes we just want people to inexplicably scream “FUCK!” in our faces or call us assholes, because it would make us feel better about being assholes ourselves. Everyone in San Francisco is always lining up politely and smiling and asking how we are. I love that about this place, but I’m not totally used to it yet so sometimes it makes me feel like shit, like maybe I am not as nice as I thought. Then we turned my tea lights on and just laid in my bed and held hands and let our bodies melt into each other the way they used to. You could tell we both needed to be touched in a comforting way, in a way only someone you used to love can touch you.
I burrowed my face in the sheets and said, “I miss my friends,” and he said, “I know you do.” I said, “I don’t miss New York,” and he said, “I know you don’t.” We can try and try, but save for amnesia, you can never really unknow someone you used to fall asleep beside. We talked about the time in New York when we both got really sick and didn’t leave his apartment for three days, and then about the time we weren’t sick at all and still didn’t leave his apartment for three days, because that would require getting dressed; love gives you the energy to do a lot of things, like function on very little sleep and travel long distances without bitterness hardening in your throat, but when you’re in love other things like getting dressed can become quite unnecessary.
I told all of this to a friend and he said, “I don’t know about you two hanging out.” I think it’s okay to need other people sometimes, if only to stare at the ceiling with them while they quietly stroke your hair. I think we need each other right now, for different reasons that we shouldn’t ever discuss out loud. Some days we just want someone to hold us in a way that says, soundlessly, “Everything will be okay.”
Later that night he and I sat talking on my front steps, and when we looked up we saw the Big Dipper looming right above us. “I forgot that you can see stars here,” he said. I asked him where the North Star was. We looked and looked, but there was a lot of light pollution and neither of us had our glasses on, so we never found it.
I feel the same in parties, even with coworkers I’ve had for 1.5 years. I also feel the lonely in Cleveland. I find that I miss my college friends much more dearly than I could have imagined when I matriculated.
I find some (read: very little) comfort in knowing that there are many lonely people feeling lonely at the same time as me.
[...] night before, I had drinks with Jeff in a bar by my apartment where the beers are only $4 and everyone smokes cigarettes inside. There [...]
Heart Warming…thanks!