Letters to the Editor
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It's funny how people filter this stuff
To those who insist the LW and others need to 'get a life':
I have a full time job, go to the gym most nights, hike with my dog on the weekends, take classes, see films and live music, blah blah blah. In addition to my full time (for money) job, I'm also a writer. I've been married and have a son.
Don't assume that my life must be radically different from yours for me to feel this lonely.
I'm not looking for a "tribe" or companion because my life is so empty and I don't have a creative outlet. Not because I live in the basement of an opera house and wear a mask to cover half my face. Not because I don't have a vibrator.
Because I have built a life I really enjoy and want to enjoy it with other people, because I want that familiar face across from me at the dinner table and his eyes to shine at me lustily at 3:00 a.m., and because I want to have as much sex with a loving partner as I can before I expire . . .
Because I've overcome a lot in my life (and much worse has happened to "disfigure" my life because of this than some jerkoffs pushing me out of their group) and I've learned a lot and I'm ready to be there for someone in a way I've never been before. (Because I left the drama whore thing behind me . . . )
I don't spend my days e-mailing folks who don't want to hear from me and all that.
Finding the right "tribe" is harder for some of us, for varying reasons. People want to put a label on whatever's "different" so they don't have to think of their own neediness and how it would feel if they hadn't stumbled onto their partner at that dinner party or whatever.
Lonewolfy: here in Los Angeles the Starbucks are chock full of people who are there alone. A city of 6 million and loneliness is epidemic. The closest I've been to the Dakotas is northern Montana last year for a few days. Beautiful, and 19 degrees. We think it's cold when it's 60 here. Brrrrrr.
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I couldn't take his crisis of the week...
I had a friend from high school who I started hanging around with after moving back to my home town. Everything was fine for a while, but as time progressed I grew more and more frustrated with his continual string of problems and crises.
The crazy ex-wife who put a restraining order on him, then called him and ask him to take the kids out for fun activities and call the cops on him for breaking the restraining order. Buying a POS car because of it's history, then complaining because it was costing him a fortune in repairs and breaking down all the time. Never having enough money for his rent because he spent too much money on presents for the kids (sort of forgivable) or a new Japanese tea set or music CDs. (not forgivable)
It reached a point where I replied to one of his emails and pointed out that his current set of problems were a direct result of his actions/decisions. He did not take it well. After that I stopped replying to his emails.
Cold? Maybe, but I had my own day to day issues to deal with and I running out of emotional reserves to keep him buoyed up.
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I dumped a friend...
when I met her for lunch and realized, 45 minutes in, that she had talked the entire time. I had just returned from presenting at a national event and she never asked how my trip was, never came up for air, never allowed me to interject. Her monologue was about her most recent "drama" which consisted of her ongoing plot to discredit a coworker who implied that she is heavy. (She is!)
I decided then & there that I did not need a petty, treacherous, self-involved friend. She didn't care about me; I was an audience.
LW: get over yourself.
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drama can be draining
LW, i think you need a friend with more issues than you: someone who wears you out and makes you long for space, someone whose tiny little first world problems are so much tinier than yours in comparison that you just sit on the phone, roll your eyes, and make that "blah blah blah" yapping gesture with your hand.
i've been on both sides of the monster and seeing the other side has made me:
a)able to be the quiet observer in the coffee shop. nothing to see here, move along.
b)much more selective of my friends. there is a circle of trust, and very very few are in the center of the circle, though the outer rings are quite well populated.
good luck and thanks for the picture of the soul from your pocket. it made me laugh. i think you'll be just fine.
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strange sensitive plant
Some posters here said or implied that acting like a needy man-child is a choice. I disagree. To a certain extent, you can alter your outward behaviour. But getting the inner man-child to grow up is an altogether different can of vegetables. You might recognise mature behaviour, and want to act that way but keep on behaving like a needy twat despite your best efforts. Good therapy can help somewhat, but only after a long time.
And yes, some brains are wired differently, and so the owner will feel pain and anxiety and stress in situations where other people would cope much better. Check out the book called, I think, "the highly sensitive person". Written by a psychologist who studied sensitive folk, it's really insightful, lots of helpful information about why some people feel so traumatised all the time, and how to cope with being so sensitive. Brains are amazing things, but they can get permanently altered by traumas in early childhood and later, which leads to a high stress response being constantly switched on. That's a physiological, neurobiological fact, proven and tested by science. And for a 'highly sensitive', artistic ' child, even average stress might have a permanent damaging effect on the nervous system. Hence the 'drama queen' reactions, and posters here who think it's just a matter of trying harder, really haven't a clue what it's like to feel like that. It's fucking torture.
As to the lone wolf thing. Yeah, me too. I'm anti-magnetic - something about me repels people. There's such a deep well of neediness, pain, fear, self-hatred and loneliness, that makes peoples' eyes glaze over and run away from me even when I'm acting 'normal', pretending like I don't have this desperate hungry monster inside me. Strange thing.