Introspective Hell | The Post That Lasts Forever
There’s something embarrassing going on in my personal life right now. I’ve resisted writing about it because, hey, embarrassing. It’s also a recurring issue that usually goes away after a while. But this time, it’s gotten big enough that I really can’t focus on much else. I’m in a constant state of anxiety about this, which I consider to be Yeshivatacon in an emotion suit, telling me, “FOR REAL DEAL WITH THIS SHIT.”
Here’s the embarrassing thing: I don’t really have many friends. “Many” feels like a cushioned way of saying it, because I don’t feel like I have any friends. But using extreme language like never, always, any, is a trigger that lets me know I’m not viewing things realistically. The truth is, there are people I consider friends but am in barely any kind of touch with, for various reasons. And there are one or two people in town that I chat with on occasion. But, add them all up, and I can count them on one hand.
This depresses the ever-loving shit out of me.
That’s a coy way to say it. What really happens is, occasionally I spin into a very deep hole of self-loathing about it. A hole where I think about how much better off I was when I still cut myself, and could teach myself lessons. There are a lot of things in my life that aren’t quite perfect, that provoke a little anxiety, that are irritating or angering. I’ve learned how to deal with those in a reasonable, measured way, without blowing things up, without letting it become personal. If work is stressful, it’s not because you suck, Harriet! If that guy cut you off, it’s not because you’re ugly!
I used to think that way. I have a keen memory of my first job as a busgirl. I dropped a glass, and without missing a beat planned out exactly how, where, and for how long I was going to cut myself that night to “make up” for it – I had to “learn” not to be such a screw-up, or everybody would hate me. It was a very self-centered way to think, believing that every minor insult or injury or mistake would cause the world to implode around me, though self-centered isn’t the same thing as self-esteem: it was based in a core of self-hatred so thick I could barely walk straight. It took time and practice to get over that, and a lot of kindness and patience to myself. Plenty of people freak out about the little stuff, but most are still able to operate without cutting themselves because they made a joke that fell flat. Not being able to do that made me feel so damaged, so stupid, so immature and alien, and without patience and kindness, those feelings kept me in a bad cycle. As in, “Hey, Harriet! Be nicer to yourself! Don’t think about suicide because you couldn’t figure out how to talk to anybody at a party! You’ve got to work on this!” vs “Normal people don’t have to work on this. Normal people aren’t insane like you are. Normal people would never have to talk themselves down from everyday interactions. That’s because you’re not normal, and that’s why we’re going to fancy suicide for a few days, because somebody as abnormal as you should be put down.”
Anyway. Time, practice, patience, kindness has got me up to par on most basic living skills. But they haven’t made a dent in the friend thing. I don’t know how to make friends. I don’t know how to keep friends. I don’t know what friendship is. I don’t know how to be a friend. I don’t know how to learn what I don’t know. Coming-of-age movies leave me confused and frustrated and emotional, because I can’t understand how all these people are friends, how they know they’re friends, how they know how to act with each other, how they know that it’s okay to like each other or hang out or talk. It all seems to come naturally to other people. It comes so naturally that I can’t even describe to others how unnatural it is to me. My questions just don’t even make sense. Questions like, “How do you know you’re friends?” or “How did you know it was okay to hug right then?” or “How did you know it was okay for you to call, that they wouldn’t be mad, that you aren’t calling too much?” Every question I ask just illustrates for me further what a creepy alien creature I am, which makes me hate myself so much that I just don’t want to ask anymore, or try.
I know other people have problems making friends. I know I am not unique in all the world. Which is how I also know that this is a deep-seated issue about me more than it is about the subject, because I feel like I’m the only person who has problems, and I feel like I’m unique in all the world. I can’t shake those feelings no matter how much I know it’s not true.
I know where some of my issues come from. I don’t like talking about them, because I feel like it’s all one big sob story. I’m really hard on myself with this shit. Before I can get these words out, I have to plow through all this yammering abuse in my mind that sounds something like, “Oh, here we go. Harriet is going to tell all of us how hard her life was. Jesus christ, when is she ever going to grow up and stop talking about it? Whine whine whine, I got abused. Fucking tough. Lots of people got abused, not all of them can’t manage to live like fucking human beings. God, no wonder nobody likes you. Who could? All you want to do is blame your problems on everybody else. What a sad little childhood I had, oh, everybody, you must be my friend now! God.” I don’t even know how to write about this because my head is so screwed up about it. I am pausing in between every sentence to avoid self-hating disclaimers, like, “Now I know this is stupid, but” or “I’m not saying it was hard for me, but,” or “Sorry for talking about my life and feelings, I know nobody cares, but.” Which is all operating as another disclaimer: this post is probably going to be confused and written poorly.
I don’t remember being shy when I was a little, little kid. Maybe I was. But I don’t remember having trouble making friends at all. Or, you know, maybe I just don’t remember being lonely. My parents divorced when I was in first or second grade, and that’s when my friendless memories start. My elementary years were almost completely isolated. I was doing things other kids my age didn’t do, wouldn’t understand, like cutting myself, planning my suicide, or imagining what it would be like to be raped and killed. This was, like, third grade. My prognosis was that it would be great because I would finally be getting what I deserved and also somebody would touch me a little, even if just to hurt me. My dad didn’t really touch me or my sister. If we bumped into each other on accident, we’d draw back in shock with a lot of “sorry sorry sorry.” Occasionally, if a circumstance arose in public where it would look weird for us not to touch (like at an airport before we went to our grandparents for the summer), there would be an extremely awkward imitation at a hug, with all parties looking mortified and shuddering. We were only allowed to visit our mother for three weeks out of every year, but I remember how much I looked forward to it, because there would be hugs and kisses and cuddling and casual touches that didn’t require both parties to draw back as if we were on fire.
This transferred inappropriately at school. When I was playing with another child, if they accidentally touched me, I would pull back immediately, withdraw, and shut down. I didn’t want them to see how much I needed to be touched, how much I enjoyed just having an elbow brush against somebody else. It was so warm. I didn’t want people to know that it felt different to me than it did to them. I didn’t want them to think I was taking advantage of them, getting something out of their thoughtless touches that they hadn’t intended to give me. I didn’t want to be creepy, so I was cold and unapproachable instead.
My dad really wasn’t prepared to be a parent, and he neglected me and my sister in a lot of serious ways. We didn’t have proper clothing. By the time third and fourth grade rolled around, I was wearing too small clothes with holes and stains. Dad would take us shopping for clothes occasionally, but he didn’t realize we weren’t adults. He would just drop us off in a store, tell us to pick things out, and then come back and buy them. I didn’t know how to find a good fit, or matching clothes, or clothes that made sense for my age group. I was also terrified of buying too many clothes. There were times where I would pick out new school clothes – nice ones, clothes I had seen other girls wearing – and my dad would fly into a rage because I thought he was “made of money” and I was a “spoiled brat.” I would try to pick out the cheapest clothes possible, regardless of whether or not they fit or looked good. Dad would rarely take us clothes shopping on his own – we usually had to ask him – so I stopped asking. During gym class, I would go into contortions in the corner, trying to change my clothes without ever revealing my underwear, which was stained and full of holes. Kids didn’t notice fashion very much in elementary school, but they did notice when I wore the same pants for a week, or wore tights instead of pants, or had holes in my shirt, or “forgot” to wear socks and underwear.
Winter was worse. I could stand how ugly I looked during the rest of the year – that was just aesthetics, petty concerns – but during the winter, I actually needed clothes. I was a kid and sometimes lost my hat or mittens, but had stopped asking dad to buy more. Each request for a pair of mittens inevitably ended in three hours of my dad screaming at me, pounding at his chest, telling me I was trying to kill him by triggering a heart attack due to stress about money, and if I was going to siphon money out of him like a little monster, well, then, I wasn’t going to college, and in fact, why don’t I just go live on the streets? It wasn’t worth having to pretend-pack a suitcase every time I wanted a hat. I ended up wearing something I dug out of the closet, something the previous homeowners had left. It was an adult sized bright orange ski mask. The kids at school playfully called me Pumpkin Head. They didn’t realize how much that hurt; they just thought I really liked orange. I think they would have stopped if I had explained it to them, but I didn’t know how to explain being afraid to ask my dad to buy me a hat.
When I was about seven, every day at the bus stop, I would start hysterically crying. Every morning I would tell myself that I wouldn’t, that it wasn’t that bad, that I was a big baby, but every day it would happen. My sister was embarrassed and angry, but I couldn’t stop. It was the dead of a Midwestern winter, and my socks were thin, threadbare, with holes in them. My toes would begin to hurt so much that I would just start howling in pain. Every day, when we got on the bus, I’d immediately curl up in a seat, take my shoes off, and breathe on my toes until they didn’t hurt anymore. One day, when we got on the bus, the bus driver handed me several packs of warm winter socks. I was tickled and overjoyed. Somebody had gotten me a present! I didn’t “get” the subtext of this, that a complete stranger was offering me charity, that I was so neglected that I needed charity. I think my sister was old enough to get it. She fumed during the bus ride, cutting her eyes at the driver. I was preening over my present, and she hissed at me, “Put those away. Don’t let anybody see them.”
I also didn’t know how to brush my hair. I have very thick, very curly hair. Only now in my adulthood have I started to learn how to deal with it, and only by reading books on African-American hair care. White hair care tips seem to imagine “thick” hair as something that is only a little wavy; my hair will break combs. My dad has very fine, very straight hair. I watched him brush his hair with a tiny little pocket comb and did the same with mine, to absolutely zero effect. My dad didn’t want to buy me and my sister separate hair care products, so we used whatever shampoo dad used, and conditioner if there was any (conditioner, I learned, isn’t really a necessity for thin, fine hair – but it was for mine). There was one single comb and one single brush in the entire house. My sister’s hair was also very fine and very thin, so it worked well enough for her, but I could barely pull my fingers through my hair. If I ever went out into public without groomed hair, my father would find a moment to screech at me publicly about how much I must want him to die, going out looking like a street child. Of course, I never could groom my hair. I didn’t know how to make it look like my dad’s or my sister’s, and I didn’t know what properly groomed curly hair looked like. On days when my dad forgot to leave the comb at home and my sister forgot to leave the brush at home, I brushed my hair with a fork.
We didn’t have enough food. It took my years to realize this, because I didn’t know what “enough” food was. I remember occasionally getting invited to group sleepovers, and marveling at how I was able to eat tasty food until I was full. I came away with the impression that this was what families did when other people were coming over; otherwise, I figured, they all ate like we did. I remember days where my sister and I would eat dry lasagna, or flour. At school lunch, I would eat my meal as quickly as possible, then go stand patrol at the trash cans. When kids came to dump their trays, I would ask them if I could have their leftovers. If they said yes, I’d scrape them onto my plate. I remember, on the days where I got a lot of food, how much easier class seemed – I thought it was because I’d been so smart at lunch, getting extra food, that it had warmed up my brain. I was too young for a while to know how shameful this was. It seemed simple in my mind. They didn’t want food, and I did. I didn’t understand why I wanted food so much, or why they seemed to want it so little, until one day a bully clarified it for me: “Harriet eats out of the garbage! Harriet gets her clothes out of the garbage! Harriet’s fat and made of garbage!” I wanted to stop after that, but found I couldn’t. Every day at lunch, I would stare at my empty tray and will myself not to look up and notice all the kids throwing food out. I told myself I was fat and ugly, and would only get fatter and uglier with more food. But every day, I’d end up by the trash cans, begging, now knowing I ought to be ashamed. I felt like I had no willpower. I didn’t realize how hungry I was. I had always been hungry. I thought this was how everybody felt, all the time, only they managed not to eat garbage somehow, while I was too weak to resist.
A janitor took some pity on me. When I’d head for the garbage cans, he’d come over and pretend to be cleaning. He’d chat with me, about movies and books and school. If a kid started to snidely ask, “Harriet, why are you always by the garbage?” he’d say, “She’s talking to me. We’re friends.” It meant a lot, but it only helped a little, because now Harriet was such a freak that only the janitor would be her friend.
The worst was class field trips. I finally took to forging permission slips, since it would be another massive fight and a half to get my dad to sign one. It would go like this: “Dad, could you sign this?” “I’m busy. Ask me later.” The next day, “Dad, could you sign this?” “GODDAMMIT I’M BUSY. YOU’RE ALWAYS BUGGING ME. DON’T YOU THINK ABOUT ANYBODY BUT YOURSELF. I GUESS NOT YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN A SELFISH BRAT. GO SIT IN THE BASEMENT.” Since I was forging, I didn’t have a hope of getting my dad to buy me a bag lunch (at that point in my life, it was a special amazing treat to get a sandwich from the gas station – I still remember how they tasted, which, believe me, is nothing like they taste when you’re not starving). I would make myself “muffins” from the few things we had in the house — flour, sugar, water, oil – and eat them on the bus in one huge, hidden gulp. I was terrified a teacher would see me and know that I had forged my slip – if I hadn’t, I’d have a real lunch, like other kids. One day we had a field trip that stopped at McDonald’s. All the kids had been told to have their parents give them money for a meal. My plan was to hide in the bathroom until it was time to go. A teacher I barely knew had apparently been keeping an eye on me, and when he saw me emerge from the bathroom, he immediately asked if I had eaten anything. I had to admit that I hadn’t. So he bought me a Happy Meal. I wanted to throw it out when he wasn’t looking. I was so ashamed to eat somebody else’s charity. But he watched me like a hawk and I ate every bite, taking care not to eat so fast that he would feel he had to buy me another. I still remember his name and how much that Happy Meal cost. I committed it to memory, because I felt that if I could pay him back someday, it would be like it had never happened.
For a few days one year, a girl from the popular crowd seemed to make an effort to get to know me. She’d specifically stand by me in the lunch line, or ask to sit with me during class. I remember staring at her, paralyzed. She was a perfectly nice girl. I could see that she was trying. But I had nothing to talk to her about. She was clean. She wore nice clothes. Her hair was brushed. She didn’t eat out of the garbage. What could I say to her? What could we have in common? In the back of my head, I assumed she had lost a bet. I couldn’t conceive of any other reason for her to talk to me. I would stare at her in horror until she went away and eventually stopped trying. I think of her every time I freeze up in a social situation. I try to remind myself, “Some people are just truly trying to be friendly,” and then I remind myself, “And you always manage to fuck it up, you freak,” and I’m right back where I started.
Near the end of elementary school, I started to fall in with a group, to my amazement. For about a year, I actually had friends. I don’t know how it happened or why. It never occurred to me that maybe I was just plain likable. I was always waiting for things to implode. Even after it was firmly established that we were friends, I would always give those kids an out. When I walked into class in the morning, I would pretend to be busy and involved with something else. At lunch, I would always pretend to be fiddling with my tray or taking forever to choose my milk. At recess, I’d walk around very busily, as if I had a destination in mind. If they didn’t call out to me, or say hi, I would ignore them. In my mind, I was giving them an opportunity to ignore me. I always suspected that somehow the spell had worn off, they had all woken up and realized, “My god, we’ve been hanging out with Harriet,” but because they were nice people, they wouldn’t have the heart to tell me how much they hated me. I wanted to give them every opportunity to break up with me without having to feel bad about themselves, or without having to hear somebody I had liked tell me, “I don’t want to be friends with you.”
The summer before junior high, my grandmother cut all my hair off. She told the hairdresser to turn me away from the mirror and cut it off without me seeing, because she knew I wanted my hair long. I still can’t explain what my grandma’s game was here. She was an abusive woman, and just the fact that I wanted my hair long might have been enough to make her decide to cut it short. My hair was also, as I mentioned, ridiculously ungroomed. I got this hair from my mother’s side of the family, and I was the only one who had it. Nobody knew how to deal with my hair. My grandmother ripped it from my head trying to brush it. She might have just figured it would be “better” for me not to have such wild, untamed hair. In any case, this meant I started junior high with absolutely zero body development and a boy’s haircut. Combined with my dirty, ripped, stained clothing, I was prepared for a lifetime of ridicule. Luckily, I was getting old enough to accommodate myself to starvation, and no longer tried to eat other people’s leftovers. I had found the secret was to eat small meals all the time. Whether there was edible food present or not, I would force myself to eat far less than was available or reasonable; that way, it always seemed like I ate so little by choice, rather than because there wasn’t food available.
Here’s how little I was eating: In 7th grade, I started my period. I had it for about six months. Then it went away until 10th grade, when my dad remarried and food started to appear in the house.
In junior high, I figured out a new tactic. Make myself weird on my own terms, instead of being the girl in the garbage can. I took my ripped up clothes and added safety pins. I took my pale, sunken face and added vampire books. I took my secretive, withdrawn, cold manner and added a pentacle necklace. Now I was a punk/goth/witch. We had a field trip one day, bag lunches required. I brought the only transportable, edible thing in the house: a raw potato, wrapped in tinfoil. One girl looked at me and said, “You’re so wild! You don’t give a shit what anybody thinks, do you? You just eat what you want!” Okay, I can be that girl, I thought. It was better than being garbage can girl.
I did end up with friends in junior high. Having such an obvious identity made it easier. Celena was a punk, and Kathy was a goth. I remember being irritated with both of them. They were obsessed with pain or darkness or deep emotions or difficult trials, but to me, they were both soft and spoiled. They each had two parents, they had a house with plumbing, they had food, they had clothes. Sometimes I’d hear the way they talked to their parents, and I’d be amazed. They talked back, yelled, slammed doors, broke rules, threw tantrums. When my dad and I “fought”, I put all my focus into my facial expression. If I twitched, if my eyes moved a hair, if I didn’t keep the perfect blend of fear/sadness/remorse/defeat on my face, it would be all over for me.
I liked being friends with Celena and Kathy – they were nice to me – but I hated the person I had to be to do it. This is a dire misappropriation of the term, but I felt like I had to Uncle Tom them. I was the weird girl. I was so wild and crazy, I didn’t even care if my hair was brushed. I would sing and dance and act like an idiot, because whoa, Harriet, she’s so crazy, she doesn’t even care what people think. I was the friend on wheels, who would follow them around no matter what they wanted to do. I had no idea how to assert myself. I could see how their home lives – their ability to argue with non-abusive people who loved them – was giving them practice at confrontations and boundaries in the real world. I could see that the only skill I had was instant submission and really keen acting, so that’s what I did, and that’s who I was. I was the weird crazy friend who would do or try anything you told her to do or try.
In high school, I got more friends. This was, like, my golden period of friendships. I met Badger, who was outgoing as anything, and loved me to pieces. I made all my new friends through her, and always felt that if she went away, so would they. I was taking my persona and running with it. Whenever I had a little money, I spent it on weird clothes, so it didn’t look so much like I was piecing together fake weird clothes from ripped up sweaters I wore in fourth grade. Not getting touched was no longer a problem – I was far enough from my garbage-eating persona that boys were willing to touch me, though I still pulled back from them, not wanting them to know how much I liked it.
I had to hide my friends from my dad. Since elementary school, I had come home with made-up stories about friends. If my dad suspected I was abnormal in any way, I would be subjected to a lot of concern trolling about my mental health, and then threats about having me committed to a psyche ward would creep in to every fight. So I acted violently cheerful and excited and full of friendship at home. Once I actually made friends, I was able to tell him non-made-up stories, but I carefully switched my friend’s names around on a biweekly basis. I had learned from experience that if my dad knew I had a friend who was important to me, a friend I spent a lot of time with, he would take them away from me. In elementary school, he called a friend I had lent a book to and threatened to kill her. In junior high, he called a family down the block who was going to have me babysit for them to call them junkies and sex fiends. In high school, he threatened to call the school and tell them he would sue them if they let me hang out with whoever my friend-of-the-month was. So I made up fake friends, and gave my real friends fake names, and when my dad picked a fight with me and told me, “And your friend Caity? Forget about her! You can never see her again! A BRAT LIKE YOU DOESN’T GET FRIENDS!” I could shrug it off, because Caity? Who’s Caity? I don’t even know anybody named Caity. Way to keep me from my imaginary friends, dad.
Later, I switched to another high school, one that I loved dearly dearly dearly. This was the high school that defended me from my father when I ran away (my previous high school, where my sister had been attending when she ran away, advised her to drop out). This was the high school that got me into college. This was the high school where the principal bought me my tickets to prom, because he knew I couldn’t afford them otherwise and felt I deserved to go.
After I ran away, I lived with Celena and her family. I’m extremely hesitant to say anything about her family. Celena herself is a writer, and I feel like if anybody gets to write about her family, she should get first dibs. That family took me in. They gave me a roof over my head and food to eat when I didn’t have either. I’m grateful. But I’m also so so angry at them. They fucked up in a lot of ways with me, and as a result, though Celena and I are now on good terms again, I don’t think we’ll ever really be friends. It was all out of ignorance, and I can sympathize with them at the same time. But they were adults and I was a kid; their ignorance hurt me a lot, and while they had the ability to get educated, I had no ability to defend myself. I wasn’t being abused in their home, so that was better than it could have been. But I was obviously a burden, an unwanted thing that became more and more unwanted as time went on. The concept of me was so angelic – what a charitable thing to do! – but the reality of me was a kid nobody seemed to like very much, who was eating too much food and taking up too much room.
Celena’s parents really didn’t involve Celena or her sister in the decision to take me in. I was thrust into the middle of what turned out to be a very touchy child-parent relationship; as time went on, I began to suspect that I had been intentionally thrust there. Just like I feel like I can’t say anything bad about them because I need to be grateful, I felt like they were using me to keep Celena from picking very needed fights with them, because they were such martyrs, and really, look how hard Harriet has had it, so how can you complain? Harriet’s dad abused her, so you don’t get to talk about your emotions anymore.
This all ended up with Celena hating the hell out of me. She was sinking into a pretty deep depression where I couldn’t reach her, and didn’t feel like I had the right – I was already intruding enough. She became deeply anti-social. I felt like having fun in front of her was mean and wrong; she was depressed because of me, after all. I didn’t feel like I could go to a party without inviting her, or hang out with anybody. Her parents were my only ride anywhere, so if she wanted to leave right after school, right after the field trip, right after the school event, I had to go with her. This wasn’t just a matter of trying to be nice to Celena. I was pretty sure that if she put her foot down, her parents would kick me out. If it was between her and me, her parents would choose her, of course.
Flint’s house became my only respite from hers. Her family hated Flint, and the more time I insisted on spending with him, the more they were disgusted with me. But he was the only friend I had; all my other friends were his. If I lost him, I’d have nobody but a family I wasn’t a part of who couldn’t wait until I moved out and disappeared. And I felt like I was doing them a favor, staying out of the house as much as possible. They obviously hated having me around; maybe if I barely lived there, only came in when everybody was asleep, only ate when nobody was looking, it would be like I had never come.
Once I got to college, I discovered what an alien I was. Freshmen only want to talk about family. They’re homesick. They talk about where they came from, the stupid things their dad used to say, the good food their mom cooked. I had nothing to say. Celena’s parents weren’t my parents. I had tried to call them once to tell them I was doing well, and Celena’s mom had sighed and said, “Why are you calling us?” Trying to tell stories about them using “my mom” or “my dad” made me choke on bile, and trying to explain who they really were got me a lot of cock-eyed looks. And what did I have to say about my real parents? “This one time, my dad’s face turned bright purple when he acted like he was going to hit me!” Or, “This one time, my mom told me this real zinger of a joke about her old dealer.” I just stayed quiet, and angry, and tired. But I was okay with it. I was okay with working myself to death and being alone. It felt better than having to deal with all the demands of people around me.
Then Thanksgiving rolled around. And I realized something that most people have the luxury of never knowing: having friends is an economic transaction. A survival mechanism. Thanksgiving was coming, the dorms were closing, and I had nowhere to sleep. Flint asked his parents if I could stay at their house. They agreed, but only if I called Celena’s parents first. It was one night. Celena’s mom sighed heavily and said they really had no room, no room at all, and didn’t I have somewhere else to go? I mean, really, Harriet, haven’t we done enough?
That summer, I moved in with Flint. I determined never to leave his side. Without him, I had nowhere to go. Without him, I had nowhere to sleep, nowhere to eat. Never mind the fact that I was paying the rent on our apartment. If I ever failed (and I knew I would someday), his parents would be the ones to bail us out. He had a safety net; I did not. If I held on to him, I could bounce in his safety net, too.
This was a lesson about friendship I never forgot. Without friends, you can’t move. Without friends, you can’t get a ride. Without friends, you don’t have a place to stay. Without friends, there aren’t favors. Without friends, you walk home alone at night. Without friends, there’s nobody to borrow money from when things go wrong. Without friends, there’s no safety net.
When I left Flint, I was also leaving his friends. This meant more than just dropping some jerks from my life. This meant I was losing a substantial amount of safety. When I moved away from Flint, Polar packed up all my stuff in her truck. I wasn’t sure I liked being friends with Polar. She was a nice person in a lot of ways. She was also racist. She was also being abused by Flint’s best friend, which risked my safety. But without her, I couldn’t move. I had no money to rent movers. I had a license, but had never driven a car outside of my test (no friends or parents to help me practice), and wasn’t able to drive or afford a moving truck.
I’ve always been acutely aware of the economic balance of friendship. Whereas other people seem able to take this in stride, as a part of friendship, maybe not even a noticeable part, it’s at the forefront of my mind. If this person helps me in this way, how am I now obligated to them? Can I afford to be? If I do this for this person, will it be enough that they will help me in the future? Can I afford to have this confrontation? I still operate with a mindset of starvation and poverty when it comes to personal relationships. I don’t have enough resources to give; I have to parcel them out carefully on calculated risks. I can’t put time and energy into somebody who cannot or will not be a friend, because someday my life will fall apart and I will have no safety net, and the money I could have spent on food or rent is money I lent to them.
I’m acutely aware of the fact that if I were to lose my bear, I would go back to a life where nobody touches me. I would go back to a life where I would have to hire strangers to help me move. I would go back to a life where, if I needed money desperately, I would have no way to get it. There are a lot of people who have had their lives fall apart spectacularly. Their partners leave, they lose their jobs, they lose their friends. Those people usually end up in their parents’ basements. I wouldn’t. I don’t have a basement I can go to and stew in and hate. If all this falls apart, I’ve got nothing. I’ve got nobody.
I realize now that I treat friends the way I treated touching as a child. I push people away. I don’t want them to know how much I need them. I don’t want them to feel I’m taking advantage of them. I don’t want to need them and then be rejected. You can need somebody emotionally, and you can need them because without them, you don’t have food to eat or a place to sleep. Though it’s not as dire as it once was, though I’m an adult now with a good job and could survive, in my mind, I need friends because without them I don’t have food to eat or a place to sleep. And that’s not friendship. That’s desperation. That’s acting like however they want me to act, as long as they don’t leave me.
I don’t know how people cross that magical line from an economic transaction to a pleasant experience that just is, just happens. It’s an exchange in my mind. I provide emotional validation; you provide company. In my model of friendship, we don’t even have to like each other, which explains a lot of the friendships I’ve had in my life. I suspect most people learned the other model – the model based on fun and qualities or processes they can’t describe – when they were so young that they now cannot remember learning it. But rest assured, they did learn. I know they did, because I didn’t. You don’t get born with the capacity for friendship. I wasn’t. And I still don’t have it. And I hate myself for how needy, vulnerable, lonely, stupid, crippled, and alien that makes me. I can’t just be casual, sit around and wait for friendships to naturally develop, run their course, and whatever other platitudes seem to work for other people. Friendship is SERIOUS BUSINESS to me, and it’s really off-putting to others. If I fuck up at friendship, I take it hard. The world, in my mind, is literally over. I have failed at life. I may not survive now.
Here is the cold-blooded arithmetic I do in my head when it comes to friendship: if I did not have a job, and did not have a boyfriend, and died in my sleep, how long would it take before somebody found me? The answer has almost always been: a month. The landlord would come after their rent. I could disappear, because I don’t have friends. Which, you’d think, would make me really gung-ho about getting some. But I’ve been on that side, and I gathered up a big bundle of potheaded losers fucks, creepy jerks, nice but deeply fucked up and dangerous people, racist and sexist nasties. I was friends with them just so somebody might find me if I died. I was friends with them so I wouldn’t disappear. I don’t want to inflict that on anybody. Who wants to be that person? The person who validates an existence? People as sick as I am, that’s who.
This is the massively fucked cycle I go through in my brain. Make friends! I think. Just talk to people! Be friendly! It’ll happen! But it never does, I counter. It never just happens. You’re too weird, is why. You’re weird and you’re scared. Everybody’s all, ooh! I’ve got it! Let’s have a normal conversation, about our interests and hobbies! And Harriet’s all, I JUST READ AN ARTICLE ON THE FATHER OF GYNECOLOGY DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY WOMEN HE MUTILATED. Everybody’s all, ooh! When I was growing up, ha ha ha I used to wear this pair of pajamas and Harriet is all ha ha ha yes I had the wackiest pajamas, three pairs of jeans and three pairs of plaid jackets because I lived on a mattress in the basement and didn’t have heat and it flooded a lot. Ha ha! The things we wear to keep the bugs off our skin! And everybody is all, ooh! My job today, boy, I filed the thing incorrectly! And I am all, yes! My job! With the little children who get raped by their parents! I don’t like filing either! So then I think, god, maybe I don’t have to talk like that, I could pretend I have other interests, right? I could fake it and pretend to be another person so I can desperately collect people around me so I don’t die alone! FUN
That world where friendship just happens somehow? Doesn’t work for me. I do not have casual subjects to chat about. I can only show my desperation full force, or not at all. I still have trouble having people in my house, because what if I have to eat while they are there, and they see me eating, and they realize that I am eating wrong? Too much? The wrong foods?
When I left Flint, I tried to not care about the friend thing. I had too much else on my plate. Clean your own backyard first, you know? But that was three years ago, almost four. I feel like I should have figured it out by now. The friend thing crops up now and again, and makes me feel like shit, but usually goes away in a day or two. This time, it’s been a solid week of WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU HARRIET YOU ARE A FAILURE OF A HUMAN BEING. It makes me not want to interact on my blog, because then it’s OH GOOD JOB HARRIET AT LEAST THE INTERNET THINKS YOU’RE COOL.
I don’t have a conclusion with this, something I’ve learned, something new I’m going to try. I feel like shit and I have no solutions. I am terminally fucking weird.
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I so know what you’re talking about. Almost exactly!! I’ve been putting off writing a post like this of my own because, of course, it would be embarassing! But I basically have the same problem. I have friends, but none that feel a need to really be deeply involved in my life or our friendship which often makes me feel subpar. I was also a poor, hungry kid who didn’t really fall into a group until middle/high school and then I ended up loosing many of the people I had friendships with since because of some highly dramatic and unfortunate circumstances. I’ve moved around a lot too, which doesn’t help. I’m frustrated that there’s something wrong with me that I can’t make friends like other people seem to. Anyway, you’re not alone. ((hug))
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Yeah. Yeah. I could have written this. Not all of it- most of my experiences were very different- but the not being able to relate to people and extreme ideation around self punishment (which I believe is a form of self harm in itself, it’s just a psychological release valve that sometimes precedes/ replaces the physical kind). In my case I just don’t know how to get from ‘nice, pleasant, person I spend time with’ to ‘friend’, and I’m far too awkward and defensive to try. Ever spend so much effort not intruding/ not being a burden/ making sure you’re not imposing that you don’t know how to reach out at all? It’s easier to dispense advice and stay detached than open up too much. I still don’t know where the balance is.
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*raises hand* Also, terminally fucking weird. (Even the kids at school who didn’t persecute me called me that.) And, also so introverted I might as well be inside out. I know it doesn’t help a lot, but… you’re not alone out there. You’re not a failure, either. This friend shit is hard. And it takes much longer than three or four years to learn, even under the best of circumstances. I am still working on it, and I’m almost forty. I left home with a lot of missing areas in my social functioning, and I’m still catching up now. And I am trying really hard to just be okay with it, anymore. I don’t have any real solutions, either.
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FWIW, I’m always excited to see a post from you on my RSS reader because I know that I’m going to find something interesting and challenging. This post in particular struck a chord because I have some idea what it feels like, and so I’m sending warm and fuzzy feelings in your general direction.
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I moved a lot in high school, and as she’d drive me up to my new school for the first day, my mom would sigh and say, “Could you at least pretend to be normal at this one?”
Not so much. Kids can smell freak a mile away.
I still have the deep fear that everyone around me is just my friend out of pity, and that if they weren’t such good people that they’d ditch me at the first opportunity. There is no empirical evidence of this, but every time I say something weird, that elicits a “Well, um, that’s interesting,” response, I spend the next two days running it over in my head and trying to figure out how I fucked up and how I could do it better.
You are so very not alone in this.
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Oh, man, Harriet, sweetheart. The abuse you went through. I want to give you a hug right the fuck now, just for being still alive. You may not know how to make friends, but you know a whole universe of stuff, and you have so much courage that when I have really shitty days, where I feel like I failed at life and should be put down, I think of you and tell myself to make like Harriet and rise above it.
You are a really amazing, kind, good person. Just thought I’d say it.
But I know how shitty it is to not be able to talk about your life, because it’s been full of degradation and horrors. I hang out at a message board for abuse survivors and we talk a lot about that – about how our experiences are so different from what life is supposed to be AND ACTUALLY IS for a lot of people, how civilians just don’t get it and never will, how if you do disclose stuff, you have to brace yourself for all sorts of revictimizing bullshit to potentially come up… Well, no wonder it’s hard to make friends.
Try some way to meet up with people who have been through this? If you haven’t tried support groups, I heartily recommend at least online ones. It’s taken away a lot of my shame to have others to talk about my life with, and not be worried about how freakish it’s been, because most of the people I am talking to have been though it and worse.
We take turns talking each other through meals sometimes. “If the kitchen is a trigger, take the food to a place that feels safe, and do the chopping, peeling, whatever, there. Eat in the living room. Eat in the bathroom. Eat in your closet if that’s what it takes to feel safe while eating.” That sort of stuff.
That stuff about the safety net, I get it too. Same here.
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Two thing in this post really, really, really struck a chord with me. The bit about getting into a fight (or rather, not) and just trying as hard as you can not to make your face move a millimeter (although I daresay my experiences are nothing compared to yours, I’ve been engaged in actual arguments and fights many a time), because it is all you can do in that moment. I’ve been yelled at for glancing away or blinking.
And the touching. I’ve been somewhat violent (though I’ve never gotten into a fight in school or hurt anyone) because of people trying to hug me or poke me. I’ve been unable to think simply because I’m sitting close to someone for lack of space, I don’t even have to be attracted to them. And then with boyfriends– I’m clingy as hell. I’m strict with who I let touch me, but when I let them, I get crazy. I don’t know why.
And yeah, the Internet thinks you’re cool. Or at least bits of it do. And the people who think you’re cool seem to be pretty cool themselves, so you’re officially Internet Prom Queen.
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You could not have posted this at a better time for me, I’m having similar feelings right now. I really appreciate it
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This post breaks my heart for that weird, sad, hungry little kid that you were. Have you ever seen the short film “Wasp” by Andrea Arnold? There’s a scene where the mom is on the phone and she’s searching the empty cabinets for food to give to her kids, and you see her kids watching her with the practiced eye of the hungry. Guts me like a fish.
What I think you’ve nailed so harshly and beautifully is that it’s hard to have good relationships when the primary feeling is one of deprivation. The other thing I think you’ve nailed is that friendships are important relationships that require nurturing and have their own rules and rituals. I needed to end a friendship with someone several years ago – we were not bringing out the best in each other, and one thing I know is that in a relationship where the participants are always apologizing and/or feeling they need an apology is a broken one. When you break up with a romantic partner you say “I’m breaking up with you” and then you stop fucking them. With a friend, there should be a ritual where you give them their stuff back and an African violet or a small piece of art and say “Your friendship has been very valuable to me, but I think we should part ways. I wish you all great things in life, please take this as a token of my esteem and think of me fondly in the future, as I will remember you.” Nowadays you’d have to also do some kind of ritual Facebook/Twitter purge as well.
What I wish for you is a way to start slow. A sports team, or an art or cooking class, or maybe learning a musical instrument. Something where you see the same people with the same interests every week, and it’s friendly and social, but there’s no pressure to be instantly friends with anyone. You can space it out over time.
And what I guarantee to you is this: Most people fortunately were not warped by the kind of deprivations and abuse that you’ve suffered, but inside our heads we’re all little freakazoids, in our own little cycles of wondering if we’re too weird for other people to like us. You don’t have a monopoly, Ms. Harriet Jacobs – that person you think is silently rejecting you is lost in her own little personal insecurity and weirdness cloud.
To quote Emily Dickinson, introverted badass:
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
Well-wishes from an Internet Stranger,
JPeep
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Your post just made me cry.
I was where you are now 3 years ago. I ran from an abusive husband who used to put a radio by my ear and blast it, because by going to sleep I was “ignoring” him, who used to ask if i wanted him to hit me–……because if i hit you, they’ll all know, and you can run and cry to the cops. As long as I don’t hit you, you have no proof” …and on and on.
I know that feeling of “friends are a transaction, and significant others are a safety net.” I still do it now too, six years after escaping and five after the divorce was final. My SO, No6, his family are so close, I cannot fathom it is truly normal. They give us money and provide for us in so many myriad ways that when I try and calculate how much we owe them, and then try tell his mother that we can pay them back, she tells me I’m sweet, and all she asks of me is to keep loving her son. I can never explain to her the terror I feel when she says that.
As for friends? True friends? Outside of No6? One–one and I cannot explain the luck of finding her, having her and that she’s even still in my life at all. She came from givers, the kind of person who was taught by example that her worth is in what she can give–and I was so needy that I latched onto her like a lifeline. I drank her until she got caught up engaged to a guy who “needed” her and I got caught up with a guy who treated me the only way I understood people who love you behave. She moved away, I moved away.
Fast forward seven years and I ran home in an escapist flight to hide in a friend’s attic who understood that I didn’t have a parent’s basement. And then one day on myspace, as I hid from myself my lack of friend by obsessively reading the internet, she found me. She was trying to escape, and was looking for a friend to help her get out and get home.
Outside of her–there are the superficial, the IMers, the co-workers, the facebook folk, the acquaintances, but I never let them get too close. You can’t let them get too close. As long as the moat stays between you and them, they won’t see the weirdness that happens on the inside. This is not abnormal. This is not proof that you fail at life. Those people with big groups of friends aren’t that close with them all–hell I have seen the more people you have in your circle, the less likely you are to be close with any of them. Instead they spend their time editing themselves and they put on different faces to match the expectations of the people they call friends.
True friends in life are few and far between. The rest are transactions–even if we dress up the windows and call it other things. The truth is, the people in my “circle” are my “friends” because I am providing something they need–a validation, an entertainment, an ego boost that they are superior, and I am their friend because they provide something I need–a daily affirmation that someone will notice if I am not present, a safety net, a level of conversation.
I hope this helps.
I love your blog.
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Yeah, when it clicked for me that most friendships are about economic exchanges – and that most of the friends I was friends with were ALL about the economic exchanges – that’s sort of when I stopped having friends. I thought I was doing something wrong, and I probably was, and I probably still am…but I still believe that isn’t really friendship. I think friendship is that other thing you were expressing in your post, the stuff about touch, and need, whether the need is physical or emotional or psychic or what. That need is never, ever wrong. We can go about it in shitty ways, desperate ways, but the impulse is right, and that impulse is about more than economic exchange. It’s about something deeper. And I don’t think anybody really knows what that thing is, at least until they find it, and some people have buttloads of friends and never find it and never know it, and some people have no friends but know exactly what it is. I think it’s one of those things that we have a bunch of ways of expressing, but ultimately, it’s a god-thing. A divine thing.
I believe there are people out there who can value you for the conversation about the father of gynecology and the childhood stories that make other people stare blankly and the horrifying, terrifying stories from your work. Just how I believe there are people out there who can value me for all the things that have previously made other people stare blankly or smile uncomfortably or change the subject or shake their heads and say “You’re so wacky, what would we do without you” while also resolving to spend less time with me or not bring that thing up or whatever. I have never really found these people who can and will value me for me, and I may never, and I am allowed to mourn for the possibility of never having someone like that in my life and close to me, but they exist, and it was the best damn day of my life when I finally realized that I can and should hold out for those people. Those are the people with whom “it just happens,” I believe that. It’s just that for some of us, the people with whom “it just happens” are rare and few and far between, and that is not our fault. They are waiting just like we are. I believe that, and posts like yours are part of why.
(Also, hi! Long-time reader, first-time commenter. I love your blog: thank-you for writing.)
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I really appreciate this post, Harriet. Hearing in such detail, such clear detail, about your childhood has me seeing some new things about my own.
Also, I think you have a memoir on your hands, if that ever interests you; you’re an awesome writer.
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Wait, no, first else: macon d is totally commenting on my blog!
Okay, : I have written my memoir, like, three times. Unfortunately, those three times were while I was with Flint, who would stand over my shoulder while I wrote and offer a running commentary about my flighty emotionalness. So they turned out like books on child abuse written by the Borg.
I’m working on a fourth!
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Another beautiful post, Harriet. Your writing always seems to touch that place inside me that rarely gets touched by other writers. You truly have a gift.
There were two parts in this post that I wanted to mention: First, the part where you mentioned how other kids get abused and they don’t seem to get as fucked up as we do. I think this is one of those things that we tell ourselves, but isn’t actually true. We never really know what is happening for anyone else, and I am fairly certain that if we really looked at the abused kids that we think are doing well, we’d be surprised. The truth is that we are comparing our insides, the worst of what we know to be true of ourselves, to their outsides – the best of what we know to be true about them. That is a game we will never be able to win at.
The other thing I wanted to say – this is a time to be very gentle with yourself. This is some really rough stuff, and I think all of us have times where we feel like we don’t have friends, and we begin counting them on our fingers as some sort of physical proof that we are wanted. You are wanted. Many people love you. It’s you who doesn’t love you, and that is not your fault. When we aren’t taught love as children, it’s really fucking hard to learn it as an adult.
I think you are doing fucking amazing, and I am grateful for every single one of your posts. Thank you for sharing this stuff with us, and making all of us feel less alone.
Butterfly
http://www.reasonsyoushouldntfuckkids.wordpress.com
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You are so not alone. Please remember that.
Thank you for writing this.
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Harriet, I know you’re fairly savvy about psychology — and I’ve gotten the impression that you’re rightfully skeptical of therapists — but have you heard much about an approach called Transactional Analysis? This whole post made me think about the “stroke economy” (http://www.claudesteiner.com/economy.htm).
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Aw Harriet, just want to hug you. You know, we are all pretty fucking weird in our own ways, just some of us learn to hide it better. My therapist talks a lot about how you spend your adult life trying to make up for the things that happened in your childhood, or you are doomed to repeat them. I am pretty sure by typing all this out, by the choices you have made thus far, you are on a better path. But it takes time. If you picture in your mind the child you were, and then think of all she needed (food, hugs, attention, respect, love…) then try to give all that to yourself now. Because you deserve that and more.
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Your issues are not my issues, but this really did strike a chord with me. I also push people away, just not for quite the same reasons. First it was because I wasn’t good enough for friendship, because I am Bad and Wrong and Crazy. Now that I’ve gotten out of the cycle of abuse and I no longer feel the need to constantly be dating and attaching myself to whoever looks at me, I just have super crazy high standards, and if someone has even one flaw (they don’t examine their privilege enough, they make the same noises my mother makes while eating, they drag their feet when they walk) then they’re not good enough for me and if I give them the time of day I’ll get sucked back in to being a codependent crazy bitch.
I don’t currently have any local friends. I have exactly one friend in the state I live in, one in Wisconsin, and one in California. I also get along with my regular bartender, but he knows exactly jack and shit about my life and I want to keep it that way.
And yes, Harriet, the internet does think you’re cool. At least this anonymous portion right here. Anybody who can actually speak up and put a narrative to this crazy shit, anybody who can work through these issues AND help god-knows-how-many readers understand and possibly work through their own issues, is really freaking cool.
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ages ago, when I first found your blog, I said you were like my though-process-twin or something. That still applies to a really eerie degree, right down to the details of this post (I also wore tights instead of pants to school for lack of proper clothes! I also was non-consensually given a boy’s haircut just prior to starting junior high school! I also ran away and lived with a friend in high school, whose parents handled things in a really less than stellar way!).
Three years ago, I also had very, very few friends, and I pretty much felt exactly the same way that you do.
The way I went about becoming more comfortable around other people and learning how to make friends was so specific and gradual and difficult that I can’t honestly say “just think of this, or do this, and it will be easier!” Even now, I actually have a circle of friends, people who are really solid and healthy and who I like and who (I have to remind myself constantly and even then I’m not totally convinced but I’m learning to deal with these things) like me, but I would not have been able to make these friends if we weren’t all involved in mutual activities like organizing and activism together. I still suck at maintaining friendships when I don’t have daily activities to bring me into contact with the people I want to be friends with. If it’s up to me to call someone for coffee, nine times out of ten I’m just not going to do it, because I get way too fucking anxious to do it. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: I worry that people think I’m a flake and don’t want to be my friend, which leads to me actually doing really flaky shit like not calling when someone asks me to call them (because if they really wanted to be my friend, they’d call me, right? ARGH MY BRAIN IS STUPID) which leads to them drawing the conclusion that … I’m a flake and probably not a very good friend.
And, I seriously feel like I have to stress: these people? Are really fucking nice. They are awesome. They are exactly the kinds of people I want to be friends with. Which is why I’m pushing myself so hard to deal with this shit so I can be their friend, too. But three years ago, I couldn’t even try. The idea of even going to a meeting once a week so I could talk to people I liked about stuff that was important to me would have just overwhelmed me, and the path I took to get from there to here was so winding and weird that I can’t even really begin to retrace it.
I wish I could be helpful with this comment.
But seriously, it means something – it means a LOT – to see someone so articulately expressing what three years ago I just expressed by taking on four jobs at once so I could tell myself I was needed and valued even without having friends. So I wanted to say thank you, again.
Thank you.
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The bits about friendship in this feel really familiar to me. I was reading a book recently and it talked about when you do shit you start by using the bit of your brain that is concentrating REALLY HARD and then eventually it moves to the bit of your brain where it just runs as a background process. Like typing took me ages to learn and here I am using internet science to explain brains.
Anyway I started thinking about this with regards to my rubbishness at friendships. I tend to have to concenrate REALLY HARD when I am with people to try and remember all the things I am supposed to ask about. Because remembering to ask about someone Aunt who was going to have a conversation is something I can do! Having that weird dynamic conversation that other people have is something I can’t!
I’ve started to try and use this model when I think about how bad I am at friends. Its not the world’s most positive model because at the moment (25 and counting) I can never get enough practise (and I hate practising) to touch type. But I like it so much better than just chanting ‘broken’ at myself when I think about how I don’t have friends.
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Also chiming in to say you are not alone. I haven’t thought seriously about it in a bit, mostly because I just don’t know WTF it is even about. It is one thing I am selfishly grateful to my introversion for– I can go miles longer on what I’ve got going right now than I would be able to otherwise.
Or maybe I’m just living out what my mother always said– that you could never have real friends. On one hand, that’s an awful thing to say; on the other hand, there is something broken in me that wants to agree. Friendship isn’t for us, I want to say.
Perhaps we should start a Friendship Economy. Where Acts of Friendship have a clear, stated value (a hand while moving is worth X FriendPoints!), and people who accrue a negative balance are tarred and feathered. Say what? Yes, things are already like this in my head; might as well formalize the process
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The internetz is funny. In real life it seems you would have a hard time approaching me and striking up a conversation but would (I hope) want my friendship whereas I have such a hard time commenting on your posts because I don’t feel like I am cool enough to interact with you on the Internet.
Seriously I’ve started and deleted comments like 5 times because I’m like “she won’t think this is good enough” or “she is so smart, how can I add anything to this”
Anyways, I guess I just wanted to say this: I totally related to a lot of what you said, even though I come from a very privileged background. To echo what some others have said here and elsewhere: you have a gift for speaking to people. People really listen to you. That is an amazing power. If I were you I would totally feel like Buffy or Superman or something. But I suppose that’s easy for me to say…
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I found this post very interesting. I’m a little surprised at how much I can relate to the feelings you describe even though my childhood was considerably less painful.
I didn’t understand this bit, though:
“It makes me not want to interact on my blog, because then it’s OH GOOD JOB HARRIET AT LEAST THE INTERNET THINKS YOU’RE COOL.”
The all-caps part is sarcasm, right? But the internet (or some of the better denizens thereof, anyway) does think you’re cool. Is it that that doesn’t count for some reason? The internet doesn’t think most people are cool. I kinda wish the internet thought I was cool. Also, the internet thinking you’re cool is probably useful. If you ever had an emergency and needed food, shelter, or some other form of help, you could probably get it just by posting about it on this blog. Moreover, the people who think you’re cool on the internet would also likely think you cool in person.
So, basically, I don’t quite grasp your reaction to the internet thinking you’re cool, and wonder if there’s maybe more to be said about that?
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I don’t have anything to say really, just thank you for this post & I think you’re an extraordinary writer and person.
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Thanks for writing this post. Some parts of it were spot-on descriptions of things that I’ve also struggled with but been unable to explain exactly. The constant self-questioning, the deep seated fear of rejection and social interaction. I’m not going to go into an analysis of the causes here, but I also didn’t really have friends for a lot of my childhood, and when I did my friendships were kind of messed up because I needed more than they needed me. I’d have a few friends and they’d be my only friends, whereas they themselves were open and pleasant people and so had lots of them. I don’t think friendships, like relationships, work very well when one side is markedly more needy–the whole cost benefit thing isn’t something most people want to think about, but it definitely does shape interactions.
Only recently have things started turning around, mostly because high school was a bit of a fresh start for me. I have a few close friends now. I’m learning, and I’m fighting down a lot of the insecurities, but I’m paralyzed about college and how I’m going to handle having to create a whole new group of friends for myself. And I don’t know whether I’ll ever stop being able to obsessively analyze my social interactions and try to emotionally beat myself up over them. I don’t know if I can stop caring about what people, even people I don’t even know/like/respect, think of me to an almost debilitating extent. I’m always on the lookout for things that can help me deal with this, and this post was one of those things.
So I can’t say this without sounding massively cliche, but it helps to know that even awesome people like you deal with stuff like this. I think you’re amazingly resilient and, if the examples you give about your weirdness are any good, weird in a way that more people should be weird. So yeah. Thank you again!
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I have lived an extremely privileged life, so in no way do I claim to know what your life has been like. But as much as is possible, I want you to know that I care. And not just because you’re a kick-ass online personality.
What you said about wanting to be touched made me cry. Hell, I’m still crying right now. I’m so sorry. You deserved to be touched, in good ways. You deserved hugs. Real ones. You deserved all of those little touches and physical affections. You still do.
Also, I don’t know how much it means (if it means anything at all) to hear this from some random online stranger who probably has no clue what the hell he’s talking about, but here it goes:
It’s not your fault.
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Thank you for writing this.
For some reason, my first reaction was “This is why language isn’t adequate.” Because the word “friend” is used a lot, in all kinds of different contexts, with the result that odd kids in school – the ones who have, you know, one or two good friends – then learn about the popular kids who allegedly have dozens of friends. And then the odd kids think they’re doing something wrong.
I was (am) weird as all heck. Some of that is my personality, some of it is my history of abuse, some of it is becasue I was a bookworm when I was younger and so I didn’t pick up the television drama behavioral shorthand for how relationships are supposed to work. So I’d encounter, say, people who insulted others, or bullied, or lied, or picked random enemies, because they saw that on TV and decided to try it, and I’d get horribly confused because why would anyone on earth practice how to be mean that way?
And then I’d decide that, well, that’s what you’re supposed to do. Which is part of why I became a bully in first grade, and why I then decided to talk mostly to teachers throughout the rest of grade school. Teachers weren’t as likely to try weird manipulative social crap, and they knew more about the subjects I cared about – science, space travel, history, animals, and so on and so forth.
I still had a few friends, people I could hang with and talk to. And that has been true as a general rule over the years: I would have people I could talk to casually, and then I’d have between one and six people who I could regard as actual friends.
In college, I encountered good people. That sounds both weird and judgemental, to which I will grin and nod. There are a lot of people out there who are okay, who aren’t deliberately mean but who are frequently petty and ignorant. And there are some people who are simply bad – abusive, or assholish, or cruel. But at MIT, I happened to come across a few places where the culture strongly selected for GOOD people. Like, non-ignorant people – ones who knew that abuse exists, and knew that different people have had different experiences, and who knew that there are folks who have serious self-worth issues due to circumstance, and who react to it with a pretty open-minded attitude.
Which is why language is not fine-tuned enough. I just described those people – but inadequately. Saying “They are simply GOOD” is not useful, because while I think it is true – like, if Yeshivatacon ever needs his Good-o-meter calibrated, he should just go to Random Hall for a while – it isn’t usefully descriptive.
They don’t tend to condemn people. They might condemn those absent, in a controlled way: “Yeah, I don’t understand why so-and-so would laugh about torturing squirrels, he sounds like a sociopath to me.” They don’t say, “You’re fat, and that’s bad,” or “you’re abused so you’re weird,” or “You’re gay / a humanities major / a Republican / foo ethnic group so THIS STEREOTYPE must be true.” They judge the person, not the shell they wear, to the best of their ability.
So now I have two definitions of friend. There are the people I knew in high school, some of whom are very good friends whom I’ve stayed in contact with. And there are other folks who I definitely consider friends, who are simply GOOD, who happen to enjoy many of the same things I do, but who are also just plain good people. Folks who aren’t outgoingly “nice” all the time, as much as people who know that they are both in a safe environment and who are contributing to that safe environment, so even if they’re just sitting in a corner reading, or admiring a new juggling trick, or playing a flash game online in the lounge, they’re good to be around.
And I have it on good authority that such pockets of sheer goodness exist in many places. They aren’t always easy to find, but they are out there.
I guess I’ve been leading up to three things. First, that it’s actually okay to have only a few dear friends and many, many more casual acquaintances; it’s not a “badge of well-being’ to be able to claim dozens of friends, since sometimes such claims are true but many times the person who says that is using a definition of “friend” that I would disagree with. Second, that there are good people out there who do understand us socially awkward folk, even if they’re not always obvious.
And third, that there are places that select for goodness in people. I submit that fugitivus has become one of them. This is partly because you actively screen. Well, so does Random Hall; you need to be a resident or to know one in order to get in, and complete jerks (when they do get in, a couple times a decade) can be banned. No, we aren’t physically present, but then, even when you’re talking with someone across the room you aren’t in precisely the same space. You can see them, hear them, but you can’t touch them or (unless you’re very close indeed) smell them. Well, on the Internet you go one step further. You can’t see them, can’t hear them – but you can *know their thoughts* on a given topic, and since thoughts are closer to who we really are than our outward appearance anyhow, I don’t really consider that a huge loss given the benefit.
Here, we can talk about really seriously important things – to us – that many people don’t think about much. Okay, fine for them. But for those people who do mull these issues over, the ones for whom these topics are really bloody important, this has become one of those good places. And that’s nothing to sneeze at.
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Harriet,
As so many people above have said, I too think you’re amazing and talented and superawesome.
I know I’m just a virtual-world stranger, and that’s not the kind of friend you’re talking about. And I also know that, as you said, this post is about what you feel, not what you know, so providing another way to approach your emotional reaction through an intellectual perspective might not be of any kind of use to you at all. But just in case it is, here goes:
Not only does The Internet think you’re cool, but The Internet would totally try its level best to be your safety net if you needed one. I know, the internet is full of people who try to post awful, hateful things on your blog, and they do post awful, hateful things on other blogs. But as you know, in the past, people have commented on your blog to say, “You’re awesome. You’re so awesome I want to PayPal you some money.” Although you’ve politely declined this offer in the past, if you told The Internet that you were in a bad place and needed some emergency funds, I have no doubt The Internet would come through for you. Asking The Internet to give you a ride or help you move is a bit trickier because it involves telling The Internet where you are, but I think there are probably ways around that, too, with careful screening.
Melissa on Shakesville posted this link– http://ask.metafilter.com/154334/Help-me-help-my-friend-in-DC –yesterday as an example of The Internet’s desire to help strangers yesterday. Someone wrote to say, essentially, “My friend from Russia is in the US on a sketchy visa and I think she’s about to get sex-trafficked. What should I do?” and lots of The Internet not only offered advice and links and telephone numbers but said, “As you’re driving frantically across the country, are you coming through My Town, because you can crash here? ” or, “My cousin speaks Russian. Do you want me to call her? In the middle of the night? ‘Cause I want to help and I know she will too” or, “Maybe I’ll just go down to that place that’s probably run by the Russian mafia where you think she’s going and see if I can be helpful” and all kinds of other things, some more wise and potentially more helpful than others, and this was all for a Total Internet Stranger. (Happy conclusion–Internet Strangers met Russian Friend and got her to a safe space.) All of which makes me think that if HarrietJ, Awesome and Beloved Blogger Extraordinaire, asked for help, The Internet would really try its damnedest to come through for her. I know I would.
All of this doesn’t make The Internet your friend in the way that you’re looking for friends. I know that. But I’m hoping that having The Internet as safety net might bring you the tiniest bit of peace of mind that might take the tiniest bit of pressure off of making friends, making it the tiniest bit easier.
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O: It’s all relative. Sometimes I do feel pretty awesome about my words, and other times I am laughing awkwardly at the bagel shop guy’s jokes and staring at him like an aye-aye because I don’t know what to say next and words? Ha ha ha ha ha, you thought you could use those?
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: Basically, it just doesn’t transfer. If I am nervous and awkward at a party and nobody likes me, I sometimes think of saying, “Well, hey, I’m actually really cool because a bunch of anonymous strangers on the internets like me!” It feels like saying, “My mom says I’m cool!” Well, yeah, great, but that doesn’t mean the person in front of my face gives a damn if I’m all awkward-laughtering up their space.
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: I’ll tell you that after freshman year, I found college a lot easier than high school. I didn’t have much more luck developing friends, but I got a lot more chances for social interaction by having really stimulating conversations in class. College also provided immediate chit-chat: “What are you majoring in? Have you taken this class? Did you hear about this thing on campus?” It made a lot of the surrounding strata of social interaction smoother, even if I still didn’t penetrate the whole friend part.
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: That is helpful. Thanks.
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This is absolutely amazing. Like previous poster said, I also lived a pretty privileged life, though that didn’t protect me from some pretty heinous shit that leaves me with the same problems around people. I have no friends beyond my current partner and a couple of internet people. I still have an abused child’s fear of extreme punishment for the slightest screwup. I was a few days behind on a mortgage payment recently (just because of oversight) and had to talk myself down from a panic attack, because I felt like any minute, someone was going to burst through my front door and beat me up.
My problems with friends have to do with the fact that most of the people I get close to figure out, sooner or later, that if they want to get something out of me, they can do it if they push the buttons that make me hate myself. My parents, my sister, my college roommates, my fuck-head ex boyfriend all figured out that I’ll dance for them if they just remind me what a selfish, awful, unlovable bitch I am, that I’m incapable of standing my ground if they push those buttons. Once someone in my life figures out how to do that, it’s pretty much all over. My only choices are to sever the relationship or kill myself. So, you could say I have “trust issues” when it comes to people. So, I’m awkward in social situations in all kinds of weird, off-putting ways. Like, I tend to ramble on about myself and over-share in a “I just want you to know how deeply arrogant and self-centered and awful I actually am so that you don’t get buyer’s remorse down the line here” sort of way.
I will say that thanks to therapy, I HAVE seen a glimmer of hope. I’m not ready for friends yet, but I like to think that the fact that I’m ready to start thinking about friends, about how healthy friendships might look (even though that picture is basically a Rorshach blot right now), what I might want out of them, the fact that I’m starting to see what was wrong with my past relationships and starting to consider the possibility that it wasn’t all my fault, is a step in the right direction. At the risk of sounding like a patronizing douche, I’ll just offer the possibility that maybe your ability to even right this, to even think these thoughts in this way is a sign of hope. Hope in what may not exactly be clear. But maybe, at the very least, it’s a sign that something is different from before.
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After what you’ve lived through both as a child and as an adult, it wouldn’t be too surprising if you find it difficult to trust. In several of your posts you sound like you have felt betrayed by friends or acquaintances in the past. It takes a lot of time to feel comfortable with anyone after that. I know I’ve had trust issues with friends who failed to support me in issues that mattered to me and I felt I had to let them go, because ignoring the glaring differences felt like I had to make myself disappear or turn into someone else to keep people around. Worse case scenario: I can go see a film on my own. You’re busy, you’re working, you live with someone, so that adds to the difficulty of meeting and getting to know people. Hopefully, your partner is supportive. Maybe online acquaintances feel like “your mom”, but even a mom’s opinion can count for something, sometimes.
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I see a lot of similarities between people who were abused as children and people with ASD in terms of social interaction. When you’re raised in an abusive situation you don’t learn how to interact with other people in a socially appropriate way.
I realized this when I had a job working as an aide with a child with autism and I was learning SO MUCH from learning how to teach him how to interact with others and make friends. The scripts to use when talking to someone, what to think about when preparing to talk to someone, what it means when people do things or say things – so much became clear. It was like “Oh wow! So THAT’S how the humans work!”
It was so uncanny that for about a week I wondered if I was in fact on the spectrum, but after much research and consideration I realized that it was just that no one had ever really taught me how people are supposed to interact with one another.
In teaching him how to make friends, I learned how to make friends. Even though a lot of the time when I interact with people my brain is telling me I’m stupid and weird and oh my god am I doing the right thing blah blah blah making me crazy, I *know* that the words I’m saying are socially appropriate. (So much difference between *knowing* things and *believing* things about myself and my social interactions, but I’m working on it.)
, reading your post was like reading about my life. Same name and all! I’m still working on believing that I don’t need to do nothing but work and volunteer to be worth anything and that these lovely people think that I am lovely and want to be my friend. It’s getting easier, but it is a process. Solidarity
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Another friendless screwup says Thank You for writing this.
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IMVHO, anyone who can’t deal with a little of your awkward laughter in their face and see beyond it and deal isn’t someone who is likely to be a good friend anyway. I wish I could give you a hug (but then I’d be all freaked out about whether or not you really liked ME or you didn’t like hugging or just thought I was a weirdo who didn’t respect your boundaries and stuff.) Is that weird?
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I think you are doing fucking amazing, and I am grateful for every single one of your posts. Thank you for sharing this stuff with us, and making all of us feel less alone.
I couldn’t say it any better than that.
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I just wanted to share something my dad said to me when I was a teenager and all angsty over some shit that went down with my friends: In this life, you will be very fortunate if you can count the number of good friends you have on one hand.
That’s only to say that true, good friends are not usually in large supply. I was shocked when he said that–in my world at that time, one should have dozens of friends. As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned the wisdom of that saying several times over.
I’m sending virtual hugs. I agree: be gentle with yourself. This is hard work, friendship. I hope you are able to find your way to friendship and all the good and bad things that come with it.
And if you were to be in desperate straits again, I hope you would come to your internet friends for help. Because I for one would be throwing cash your way and driving to your town and doing whatever you needed, and I sense that I am not alone in that sentiment.
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This post makes me want to pack up and move to wherever it is that you live so I can be your friend. (Now that I’ve written that sentence, I realize how stalkerish it sounds. That’s not how I meant it.) Not entirely out of sympathy, either–I don’t have many friends, and I’m not good at maintaining those friendships. I don’t initiate contact with people, generally, so they think I don’t want to hang out with them or talk or get together. It’s not that I don’t want to! I’m afraid my calls will annoy them or they will get tired of me, or that they don’t really like me anyway.
I had similar experiences as a kid, and I guess so did many of the other commenters. The only close friend I did manage to make in elementary school did horrible, cruel things to me, but she was my only friend at the time, so of course I just put up with it. Also, I felt like the things she did were justified because I was so weird/abnormal/unlikeable/disgusting.
I am 34 and still don’t know how not to be weird. I can PRETEND, sometimes, but it’s always tenuous. I always feel like people can tell I’m just pretending, and that I’m not doing a very good imitation of “normal”.
If we were friends, you could say whatever weird thing came to mind, and it wouldn’t faze me.
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Harriet, my heart goes out to you.
It’s interesting to compare how my experiences with friendlessness (at school; I had one friend outside of school) and not-touching play out similarly and yet differently from yours without the element of economic desperation.
I stopped being touched, and touching, at some point in my childhood and didn’t even realize it. Years later I had a boyfriend and found myself flinching away the first time he tried to put his hand on my shoulder. At that moment the realization that I didn’t allow or receive casual touch broke over me like a revelation, and I never did figure out just how long it had been going on.
The friendships I’ve had almost all fell into two groups: the kind where I was the needy one, and the kind where the friend was the needy one. It was very transactional that way.
But my lack of insecurity around safety nets makes a big difference. I’ve done the calculation about time-to-find-my-body, when I was single and anxious about having some kind of stroke and noone there but the cat, but I don’t think it held the same weight for me.
So there you see the privilege factor.
But I would love to know you and talk about all the crazy shit like the sordid history of gynecology! I am no good at small talk either.
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Just so you know, my little corner of the internet thinks you’re awesome.
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I was a very privileged, loved kid — but still essentially a bit weird, I guess. I have difficulty with social interaction too. A lot of the stuff in this post is how I feel.
I’ve moved around enough to mess with any friendships I consider real, too. However, after 8 years out of high school I have a fiance, and two people I care about and know that they care for me too. I ended up with a whole system of ridding myself of people who aren’t really friends; probably harsher than necessary, but since I get so exhausted by attempting to be social maybe not.
I think the internet is the easiest way for me to interact with people, and become real friends with someone. Talking on MSN or something like that is much easier. Online presence is a major part of my relationships, even when we’re in the same city!
Anyhoo…I guess that’s all I have, but we’re rooting for you. The internet DOES think you’re cool!
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Before I finally owned up to the fact that I was seriously depressed and went to get serious help for it, I was reading your journals, the early ones. I said, okay, this woman has a lot of insights that really seem to resonate with me. Instead of burying myself in a mindless depressed little ball, I am going to read how she progressed to the point where she is now.
And sure enough, you made a post how you had to fix the shit in your own backyard before you could take on the shit in the rest of the world. How you’d been doing the opposite. And I went, yeah, I’m doing that. Fuck.
One of the subsequent things I had to deal with was that people on the internet were not the same as real friends. They were sometimes people who thought I had interesting ideas and who were willing to say supportive things, but they were not the sort of people who would actually be there if I needed a safety net. Many of them, also, were happy to let me do whatever without actually thinking about how it affected me and my real life. They didn’t say, “You know, Amanda, I’m really worried that you said you want to do your homework, but instead you’ve decided to play games with me.” A few real life people don’t say that too, but it seems more pervasive on the internet.
And. I’ve toyed with this idea for a while, but it hit me harder today, and even harder after I read your post: I am much more comfortable with my internet friends. They feel so, so safe, even though they are not, in reality, my safety. They are not the people who are really looking out for me. And then it occurred to me that I was, in ways, much more comfortable being around people who I didn’t matter to much because, hey, they aren’t going to closely investigate the fact that I am a depressive screwup who should be having a good time (and seems to be) but who is really chanting in her head how much she hates herself and how she wishes the interaction could be over so she could go hide from herself now, thanks.
I wrote about some of this shit (I couldn’t even *say* it), and I got the response that people were So Glad I was actually talking to them and knowing how I was actually doing. I still can’t quite accept it. It doesn’t seem right: How could people like me when I am so broken? How can they enjoy being around that?
I think, though it is hard to say, that friends seem to like sharing human experiences. I don’t actually get this, emotionally, from the side I’m on, but I’d get it if I were the friend hearing stuff. I want to know how people really are. I don’t want fake happy, or fake thoughts. I want to know who I’m with, really, or else it’s all illusions, and, really, I only have one life. WHy live it in a dream?
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Well, I’m one of your internet fans, and I’d be part of your safety net if you called for help in my region, same as I would for any of my other favorite writers. Seriously, if you’re stranded in a city not your own, post to your blog, and take your pick of the responses.
And just for the record, you’re not a freak, simply undersocialized. Your father should not have had custody of a child; he is not the first father I’ve seen to act as though his children were ghosts who shouldn’t need food or clothes or toiletries, OMG the *greed* of those children, thinking they deserved actual human necessities! Isn’t it clear that he’s the only real human in the house?!
I think the thing with most people not seeming to be aware of or disturbed by the transactional/safety-net element of friendships is friendship-prosperity. If your safety net is big and there are enough resources floating around in your friend-network that any help you are likely to need is not likely to be a significant burden to any of your friends, then you don’t have to think about it. If you have few friends, if their lives are also precarious, and if you have a realistic chance of needing major help, then you do have reason to worry about troubles so heavy they would break the safety net. It’s harder to climb up from poverty than it is to remain in prosperity.
“Coming-of-age movies leave me confused and frustrated and emotional, because I can’t understand how all these people are friends, how they know they’re friends, how they know how to act with each other…”
Movies in particular are unrealistic portrayals of friendship. They leave out a lot, and they rely on cliches, and often they portray highly unlikely or impossible dynamics for the sake of advancing a plot. So that’s not a problem with you so much as a problem with movies. Novels are probably a better source, partly because they have space for a more comprehensive portrayal, and talks with your Bear are probably best. You can catch up on learning this kind of stuff, it just takes time and observation.
The “I am a horrible, hopeless mess of a person and should be put down” self-talk is of course nonsense, but when you are evaluating other people’s current or likely behavior toward you, your judgment sounds pretty accurate. The T-shirt is true: ‘Friends help you move; good friends help you move bodies.” So the way you know you’re friends with someone is if you both voluntarily spend lots of time together because you consistently enjoy each other’s company, and you would help them if they needed it and trust that they would help you to the same degree. If you feel like you can’t tell when that’s happening, it probably hasn’t happened for a while. You could tell when you were friends with Badger.
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I’m really sorry you were treated that way, Harriet.
How much does it help if I say that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you at all? Maybe it doesn’t help, but it’s true – I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. At all.
Friend-making is a skill, and it’s a skill best-learned in an environment with a basic level of safety. And it’s only been three years or so that you’ve had that! My god! The fact that you’re still figuring things out is not surprising to me. It’s a flawed comparison, but um – we don’t expect three-year-olds to understand the nuances of friend-making behavior.
You are an incredible writer. I think you’re an incredible human.
(Also, this inability to make casual chit-chat – some people really appreciate that in a friend.)
(Also also, you can dismiss your commenters because we’re anonymous, but we’re still real. Like, if you wanted to see it this way, it would be a totally valid way to see it: in an environment where you feel a basic level of safety, and where you’re not concerned with casual chit-chat, you’re getting a lot of love.)
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Harriet, I sort of want to email you because of this post, but I’m noticing there isn’t an email address attached (that I can find). I’m guessing this is purposeful. I don’t know if you’d want to email me (with a one-use email? my partner has over 3 or 4 email addresses used to separate people out, perhaps you do as well?), if you do, my email is easily findable on my blog/is just my *blog* name at gmail. I don’t even know how you feel about me, other than a couple times you’ve responded to my points and I don’t remember me really stepping in it, or you seeming to be upset, but that hardly means that you feel like you know me/like me. If you’d like to delete this comment that’ll be fine. If you don’t want to contact me, that’ll be ok/fine (I mean, any choice you make is fine), but I’d want you to know that this post was amazing. And other stuff, but I can’t quite put it into words.
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: The new email is on the About Me page. harrietj at fugitivus.net. It’s a clogged-up inbox right now, because it dumped a bunch of undelivered emails on me all at once, and also, FYI, I’m terrible at responding to emails. Especially when I’m in the middle of a complete meltdown, apparently!
True fact about me: I am terrible with names. Great at faces! Great with voices, even. Terrible with names. Since blog comments are all names, I am barely able to differentiate most of you. Sorry! Don’t take it personally. I will tell you what goes through my head when I see your name:
That names looks familiar.
Scanning for unpleasant associations.
None!
But it still looks familiar.
This person must comment a lot.
And probably comments with nice, thoughtful things.
Because otherwise I’d see that name and feel a vague sense of disquiet!
I bet this person is all right.
Oh my god Buffy is streaming on Netflix now.
DECADES LATER
Deviant who? Oh jesus christ I need to shower, Spike will never love me like this.
Okay, for serious, I bounce back quickly and find it difficult to reach out to people. I can go on and on about my problems in my mind, but if somebody were to ask me, “What’s wrong?” I would lose all words except, “Oh, you know. Nothing much. Same old, same old.” So I probably would not be emailing you, for reasons that are about me and not you. But it means a lot that you offer.
Also, FYI, as blog mod, I can see your email addresses since the comment box requires you to enter one, so you don’t have to add them again in the actual comment.
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all i can really think of is: me, too.
i confess i skimmed some of this post. i was also a victim of severe abuse and neglect as a kid, and i guess it’s something that i’ve finally stopped thinking about — how i survived, the horribly shameful things i did, the way it made my peers avoid me like some sort of plague. (because, as you know, 10 year olds don’t consider “maybe this kid is eating out of the trash because zir parents don’t feed zir”; they think, “what a fucking freak.”
anyway. i have a real life now, sort of, and i try to think that i’ve “moved on” (or whatever) from the person my father tried to turn me into, but, just like you, then i try to make friends (or deepen the kind of semi-acquaintance relationships i have) and realize that our experiences of life — even now, when i think that i have a average-as-can-be life — are so different we might as well live in different universes.
most of the time it doesn’t bother me. usually, i’m more bothered by people thinking my friendlessness makes me some sort of freak (still!) than the actual friendlessness itself. but sometimes… i’m so alone. and if i have car trouble, there’s no one to pick me up. not to mention if something more terrible happens.
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This is probably horribly inappropriate, but I really want to hug you right now.
(Shut up, Hex. Why do you feel the need to say that, Hex? What possible use could come out of this, Hex? Why don’t you go hide somewhere until you quit thinking people want to hear about your bullshit internet affection, Hex? You’re such a creepy asshole, Hex. Yeah, Harriet, you really aren’t the only one.)
I have led a very privileged life. I have nothing that could even touch the level of bad that radiates from your descriptions of your childhood. But I’ve had some seriously fucked up quote-unquote friendships in my time, and to some extent, all my friendships are seriously fucked up, because I am seriously fucked up. I am incapable of directly telling someone I am upset, past a certain relatively low threshold level of upset, unless I am in a towering rage. The closest I can come is acknowledging it in retrospect, usually while talking about how fucked up I am that I can’t even tell people when I am hurting. It is a monstrous meta clusterfuck of self-loathing and it is just the first problem of mine that I happened to think of as an offhand example.
And there isn’t even any reason for this. Sure, I have a strong family history of mental illness (depression on one side, schizophrenia/bipolar on the other), but that’s not a real reason. Sure, my mother died when I was seventeen, but I was a fuckup long before that.
I think what I’m trying to say here is that all of this shit our brains try to tell us, it is shit. And I know it’s shit, and just knowing that doesn’t stop me from cranking it out like a little hexagonal shit factory, but… all we can really do is just try to forgive ourselves, power down the shit machines, dismantle them piece by piece as best we can. And at the end of the day there is a world full of fuckups just like us out there, and fuckups who are nothing like us, and people who are hardly fucked up at all; and sometimes, incredibly, miraculously, we meet some of those people and manage to stick to them for a while and they find out what fuckups we are but they keep caring anyway.
Ugh, that first person plural pronoun was disgustingly presumptuous. (My shit factory is on overdrive tonight. C’est la vie.)
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I heart you, I heart you real, real hard.
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This little corner of the internet thinks you’re cool, too.
A couple of thoughts:
Barbara Kingsolver wrote a lovely essay about how she went back to her school reunion, after she had become known as a writer. She had written one story about a girl who was out of place, just couldn’t connect, was very lonely, at high school. At the reunion, some years later, grown woman after grown woman, including all the ones who had been ‘popular’ at school, said quietly to her, “That girl in the story – you were writing about me, weren’t you?” I think we all feel insecure at times. ‘Though your story made me cry, and want to reach out to that little girl, who had to grow through so much more than most us ever do. I can’t, of course, because that time is gone now, but I will try to do better in the community I live in. Ordinary old everyday insecurity that most of us have is one thing; the scale of the difficulty that you have lived through is extraordinary, and more than enough reason to be so very unsure about friendship and how it works.
I’m a classic introvert, and although I enjoy people, I don’t really enjoy parties, unless I know quite a few people there. I much prefer to sit quietly on the edge, people watching, and enjoying the conversations that come my way. I found it very hard when we moved cities and countries a couple of years ago. But I did join a singing group, and somehow, because I have a place there, a place where I have a right to be, I feel much more comfortable at singing group parties. I suppose it’s because I have met all the people in a much more formal setting, so I can cope with the much more informal setting of a party with them. Someone upthread suggested joining some sort of group; I think she’s very wise.
I admire your work tremendously. This little corner of the internet is thinking of you, and wishing you well.
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So much of this is familiar to me – not the details really at all, but in…the abstract? I guess? There is a long and uninteresting series of stories that explain, I think, why I only believe people will only stick around, only be my friend, if they need me for something. Anyway. I am learning, finally, a dozen years later, to deal with this (although not as adeptly as I might like). I was really glad to read your follow-up; it seems like you are doing good work. And I guess I just want to join the “I think you’re awesome, and also, you’re totally not alone” chorus.
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i can relate really strongly to the stuff about friends and touching. i didn’t have friends for most of my life – getting on the internet in middle school meant that suddenly, i could talk to people, and they didn’t automatically hate me for having been the weird kid in kindergarten. the first time i really felt like i had a friend who actually liked me, who wasn’t just talking to me because i sat near them in class, was my third year of college.
a couple of months ago, the emergency response class i teach every semester at my (now former) college had our multiple-casualty drill, where the instructors played patients and the students had to treat us, and one of the newer instructors said “man, i hate getting backboarded, don’t you?”, in the way people say things they expect people to agree with. i said “actually, i kind of like it!”, and then i spent the rest of the night thinking oh shit, abby, you’re so weird. you’re the only person who likes getting backboarded. normal people can ask their friends for hugs when they aren’t crying. normal people go on dates and let people hold their hands or kiss them. it’s only fuckups like you who actually like letting students treat their imaginary injuries because it’s the only time someone will touch them in the six months between their parents’ visits.
so, i don’t know. i’d like to give you a hug, even if we’d both be really awkward about it and not know how to start and sort of pat each other’s shoulders a few times.
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Wow. I’ve been sitting here trying to process all this and write a coherent response for hours. I’m not sure I can but I really want to try, so please forgive me when I fuck it up.
First, if you were local to LA, I’d ask you if you wanted to meet me somewhere for a drink/coffee/dinner/etc. And then figure out how to get there and do that, just so I could try (and fail miserably) at talking to you irl. You deserve huge hugs and warm smiles and lots of strong shoulders for being brave and self-knowing enough to write about this.
Second, a few people commented above about the internet as a safety net. Based on the comments that appear on every post you make, you do have that in spades (along with all the trolls). There is a community of like-minded people you’ve built here that is an awesome thing to see, and we’d be here if you needed us, each dragging the few real friends we have along to make sure you had the help you needed and the safe warm place your bio-family doesn’t provide.
Now, for the hard part:
How you manage to sort through all this amazes me. I feel like you’re writing about me as recently as 5-10 years ago, before I found out how to be who I am and became confident that I had built a sort of family that I chose, who supported me in the ways that my blood family didn’t. And I didn’t grow up in a situation where I was hungry all the time, which no doubt would have made my shit much worse than it was. Emotionally starved, yes; locked emotions to protect myself; sexually abused; fat and ugly and weird and poor in comparison to my classmates absolutely. And that was before college and a few acquaintance/date rapes made my lack of power completely evident.
But that started 30+ years ago, and it thankfully the abuse ended in 1983, so I’ve had a ton of time to figure out how to like who I am now, which is what finally allowed me to build that family. And believe it or not, time also gave me my blood family back at least a little bit; I still don’t trust them to be there, although they’ve both surprised me recently by reaching out and occasionally trying to help financially (but they’ve also been “born again in Christ” and it has changed some of their attitudes for the better even if the conversations about my atheism are maddening).
It took me a decade after high school to seem to make any friends (as opposed to the community I was part of as an NYC punk in the 80s – I was just another random girl to get drunk with and/or fuck but at least I was a part of it even if no-one really knew me – I knew their faces, their bodies, and that was enough at the time), and then those turned out to be not so much friends as people who I was acquainted with and who enjoyed me as long as I was the crazy punk who was happy to pay their way to the club/buy drinks/etc or who was willing to go home with them. Of course I probably didn’t help the situation by being drunk if I was out in public other than for school/work, or that the only physical affection I was truly capable of was sex. Casual sex & anonymous pickups (which should have left me with AIDS in the 80′s); serial monogamy, cheating on my partners/letting them cheat on me or picking fights/making them hate me rather than deal with problems or face breakups; having such a non-existent sense of self worth that for about fifteen years after the abuse started I decided in the back of my head that since I left the house someone was going to take advantage of me. That meant the best thing I could do was decide which were the least objectionable people in the crowd and make sure they noticed me/took me home rather than making my own choices and owning them.
It wasn’t til my 30s that I even started to meet the people who make up my chosen family, and I am sooo bad at talking to strangers face to face that most of them thought I was a snob or a threat or a bitch or a slut for years before we got to know each other. And that was mainly because I’d actually met my match when it came to casual sex, and started dating him, only he was a total extrovert. I had to learn how to at least be sociable in a crowd after 15+ years of going to clubs and not talking to anyone except briefly before we hooked up and I went home or sent them home, but suddenly I was dating the guy everyone knew and hosting weekend long parties with as many as 1500 attendees. One of the few good things I learned from my bio-family was how to be an excellent hostess, and although it cost money I didn’t usually have I always pulled it off with style and apparently grace according to the guests.
And for whatever reason, my punk history, my anger and ludicrous (mostly private school) education served me well in our scene. By that point in my life I knew I was a freak, bisexual, incapable of a successful monogamous relationship that lasted more than six months, and I owned those things in looks, attitude, action. It made my circle of potential friends smaller, but the freak/punk/goth/rivethead community is also usually flexible, open-minded, and smart. We were all outcasts, we still are, and since so many of us had been that way since middle school it was a bit easier to find casual acceptance, which meant actually forming some lasting friendships when the right people found my journal and started talking to me online or broke in past my walls face to face around sunrise at one of our parties (when I could finally relax since the few people left were wasted and I no longer cared because I was wasted and exhausted and had to get up in a few hours to fix breakfast for those who’d stayed and clean up before the next nights guests started showing up).
I was tremendously lucky there, or I suspect I’d be alone – no partner, no friends, and a family who seem OK now that I’m older but still don’t get me and who I will never really trust. If that were the case, I’m fairly certain when my relationship with my ex ended followed shortly by my health falling apart, my job ending, my needing help I wouldn’t be here to write this.
And yet, it was the internet that saved me last year. Unable to find work, $10,000 in medical bills and expenses, 3000 miles from the East coast where I’d lived until 40, less than a year into and still feeling out a newish polyamorous relationship in LA. I needed help if I was going to get through the next couple of months (including an unexpected move – in a large part because my ex fucked up my finances/credit then decided he didn’t have to pay his bills and wanted a divorce – and we were losing the house I rented part of). So I put up a journal post about it on my tiny, unknown lj asking people to buy my stuff or send me a commission for something they wanted made or to donate a couple of bucks toward the immediate need for prescription refills if they had something to spare. I have insurance but they refuse(d) to pay for my care, and without care I would have gotten on my motorcycle to go hunt for a job or an apartment and wound up dead somewhere (I am having memory losses aka Transient Global Amnesia on top of long-term chronic illness, and stopped riding until we can figure out WTF is going on and fix it).
I felt like not only was my body broken but all that I’d been working for since my first job when I was 13 had been taken from me, and in the back of my brain I thought my life might as well be over. After all, I never expected to make it to 40, and while my life was never perfect or what I’d expected I had a good run, and some happiness, and helped a lot of people along the way, so what more could I ask for. Plus, between my student loans from paying for college/grad school, the debt from my marriage and all the medical and living expenses I’d dropped onto my credit cards because my ex wasn’t making enough to pay for the house himself and hadn’t managed to fill the empty bedrooms after his girlfriend moved out and he was trying to get it refinanced I owe about $250,000 to various creditors, I felt I didn’t have any hope of getting out from under it and that I’d be out on the street when the house sold.
Instead, my chosen family picked up that post, spread it far and wide and helped me raise the money I needed to get by until unemployment kicked in. Donations in from people I’d taken care of but not seen in decades, from strangers who knew friends of friends of friends trickled in. People bought clothes, stuff I didn’t need or couldn’t use or was willing to part with; they sent commissions for things I could still do – albeit slowly and unreliably. And it was enough to get me through that rough patch in terms of paying to move and immediate medical bills. I couldn’t believe all those people went to such extremes to take care of me, as a response to some kindness or other, to echo my actions in paying it forward from when I was the only one with money back in the day. It made me realize that the family I’d fallen into in the last few years of my life, ass-backwards as it were, could be counted on to be there for me just as I’d given so much of myself to them. Amazing, humbling, terrifying, and still undeserved in my mind.
Yes, I’ve always been the caretaker, the one who makes sure everyone is alright, who goes out of her way to help people she barely knows if they’re part of her larger community; but that’s part of being a punk. People were/are afraid of us, so we had to take care of our own, and that was a core piece of my identity since I was 13 and started clubbing in NY to get away from mom’s, from my stepdad, and vent the anger at what was going on hidden behind closed doors. I always knew that outlet, in particular the dancing, kept me sane; I’d never realized it also made me someone other people admired and cared about as well.
I used to wish the pain, the nightmares, the physical and psychological scars had never occurred. Now, finally, I’m mostly at peace – that part of my life still haunts me sometimes, but I sincerely doubt I’d be where/who I am now if it weren’t for who I was then. And while the crowd I ran with in HS as a punk/club kid is gone, decimated by AIDS, their spirit lives on in me and the other freaks I love (although I still don’t get why they even talk to me – I’m old and terminally shy, I still come off as intimidating and snobbish, and I’m not really the life of the party, even while I make sure said party goes off without a hitch). Ah well, some things will never change completely, but life is, and I have hope that maybe eventually I’ll learn how to be around strangers and talk without liquid courage. And at least on good days I can still dance, even if I pay for it later – it still keeps me from losing it when things are rough, and LA feels like home as much as DC did for 20 years because there is a community of freaks for me to be part of.
Anyway – I got lost in a flood of memories for a bit there, but the things I’m trying to say are Thank You, Thank You, Thank You. There are a lot of us out here with similar stories or feelings about ourselves we don’t know how to tell. And we’d be honored and happy to help if you asked for it, even if we never meet face to face. You’ve got friends you don’t know about hiding in the web of community you’ve built here.
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Thanks for writing this. I didn’t learn how to make friends until my mid-twenties, and they were what eventually pulled me out of my own abusive relationship.
(I learned from my square dance club. Because doing something together that we were all interested in gave me a way to learn how to talk to people, and it gave me a way to listen to how other people were friends and learn from that.)
(But most adults in this culture don’t make any friends after college. Adult American life isn’t set up for it. So even normal people have old college buds, coworkers, neighbors, and heir spouse and kids but no new friends, necessarily. I just moved to a new city and the way I am find people to befriend is through the network of people my dancer friends know. And I know *them* because of college.)
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Damn, I sure wish I had read this first before making my other comment. I don’t want to make you feel uneasy by it.
That’s just… so hard. Not only do you have to be isolated, you have to deal with being ashamed of being isolated. But it’s not your fault, at all. Maybe it will just take a little more time.
I’ve decided recently that I’m just going to TALK to people, about anything and everything that’s close to my heart. Get it all over with like ripping off a band-aid, and see who stays. That’s my new strategy for making friends, and so far I’ve gotten positive feedback, so let’s just see how it goes past the applause. Maybe you just have to let it all pour out like verbal flooding and see who stays- and those who don’t, well, they may be nice people, but they’re not friend material.
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This post makes me want to be your friend–for me and for you. I see a couple of posts above that say “move to your city and be your friend” or “if you lived near me.” Not me. I just want to be your friend, wherever you live.
I’m good at teaching people how to be friends. I can give some answers, starting point answers, to the questions you ask that seem so uber-basic to you.
Feel free to email (or not).
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I should not have read this post at work. So much of it hits home — I’m struggling not to cry. I can relate to so much — choosing to buy weird clothes to mask the fact that my father wouldn’t buy me new, not being able to relate to my bright and shiny classmates. And, now, having to choose to be bright and shiny myself and push down the dark parts or the parts that want to talk about social justice, because I know how much it turns off others.
Hugs all around.
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This is a beautiful post — really honest, well-written and strong in its (your) willingness to be vulnerable. Thanks for sharing.
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Ah, just…
*hugs tight*
Most of the people I know believe they are terminally weird. I think it’s normal, or at least… well, does anyone really believe they are normal? That would be weird!
I wish I was cool enough, intelligent and educated and something else but I can’t think of the word for it right now – enough to be a worthwhile friend to you.
Actually, if you want to chat about Buffy, you could email me.
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Seriously, I could have written this post. Granted, I didn’t have the same type of childhood you did, but I still find it hard to make friends. All of my most fulfilling and memorable friendships happened pre-high school. After the that people started to disappear. I have one or two people in my life that I can truly call friends. Not acquaintances bit friends that if I needed a favor they would try their damnedest to do what they can for me. My mother has noticed this and she things its peculiar, not in a weird “you have a problem trusting people” way but “Isn’t that cute that you like to keep to yourself”. More often that not, I have a problem with only have two friends. I don’t its cute int he least bit, its lonely. When those two people aren’t around what happens? Where do I go and who do I talk to? Luckily I have a family to turn to, and for that I am grateful, but I cant tell my mother and father everything. I can relate to you having to “Uncle Tom” (LOL, I call it jig) for for your “friends” (for me they were acquaintances I hung out with so I didn’t feel lonely). I did that all through out high school and freshman year of college. I figured enough was enough, I stopped “jigging” and got used to being by myself a lot.
I also do that thing you mentioned. where you pretend to be busy and see if your “friends” notice. I think I do this so I don’t come across desperate. The funny thing is, once people “know me” I have a lot to say and I am very warm. However, on the surface I come of as cold and uncaring. Which is especially difficult because I’m too shy to go up and talk to people, and looking “mean and cold” isn’t the best way to attract people looking to strike up conversations with strangers. My cold demeanor is now automatic. I don’t think I can let it go without serious concentration and effort.
The boys. Yes, been there too. I have never had a boy friend and I’m 20 years old. I have even come close. In some ways this is more embarrassing for me than not having many friends. I have always been under the assumption that men like women period. Granted they have their “types” but any decent looking woman is good enough to at least be a girlfriend. This statement about men bugs the shit out of me because I’m obviously not one of those women I cant help but wonder what is so wrong with me that guys wouldn’t want me. I haven’t been on a date, I didn’t go to Prom(which I don’t regret really), and I haven’t been kissed. Thinking about all of this really makes me angry. The few guys that have tried to get to know me better I have pushed away. I don’t know if this was from fear of rejection down the road or what, but bottom-line I have never gotten far with the opposite sex.
Thank you so much for this post. Its good to know about other people that are going through something similar. I really can’t tell anyone about this in real life, its too embarrassing fro me. After reading this, I don’t feel so lonely anymore.
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This post reminds me of the time when I was thinking about my friends, of which I have few, and realized that most of of them are former roommates or former/current co-workers. This said two things to me:
1. You’re really not so bad of a person, because when these people got to know you as a result of living or working together, they decided you were worth being their friend.
2. You’re unlikely to make friends with anyone who’s not “forced” into close quarters with you.
“Making friends/socializing” has never “flowed” too well for me and I’m coming to terms with that, but what really frightens and stresses me out is the idea of networking. I’m a fairly talented artist and they say that to make it in the arts you have to be good at “networking” and “selling yourself.” These ideas are alien to me. I feel like I’ll always be held back from having a career because I can’t do what other people seem to do so smoothly.
Anyway, point is, thanks for this post. It made me feel not so freakish. Not because someone else is a freak too but because we all have reasons for “being a freak” and they’re usually not our fault.
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this was a thought provoking read. I won’t say that i can truly understand what you went through but i can empathise with your current dilemma. Making friends is difficult. difficult for even so called “normal” people. Its not like the tv shows and its a pity that it is not. what you call the ‘economy’ of friendships… wow, you hit the nail on the head. It is why i believe that you can’t have real friendship with someone who lives in different world from you – whether its money wise, security wise, whatever. The balance is anyway delicate and if you are a self respecting individual with a modicum of intelligence and the insecurity that brings, not letting mundane issues creep up between you and the other person is virtually impossible.
As someone who had to move to different schools every 3 years, i learned the art of making acquaintances… just enough so i had someone to sit with at lunch time. but the people i do consider real friends, they are the ones who i have the most in common with. Money, family background, music, kinks, quirks…you name it. maybe thats why i consider my sister to be my best friend in many ways.
I don’t think there is a right way to make friends, there is however a right way to make acquaintances… which is a skill that has more material benefits than anything else. Making connections or having the energy to make connections with other people gets harder the older you get… which sucks. Luckily, there is such a thing as the internet.
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Hariett, oh, I wish I had something wise and helpful to say. Instead, all I have is that I think you’re an amazing, wise, insightful person. I wish I had a friend like you.
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I don’t feel worthy of commenting; too much luck and privilege. I do want to add my voice to the chorus that is so thankful you are writing. I have learned so much from reading your archives, and wish that I could repay the gift.
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This is the first time I’ve commented on any of your posts, but like so many other people here, I’d like to tell you that much of what you’ve written on your blog has really been so, so helpful for me. Thank you so much.
Although I didn’t grow up the way you did, I too have had to deal with the constant stream of self-loathing that’s made it impossible for me to accept affection or compliments from a stranger/potential friend/anyone really. And I know that if I were to have written this post, I don’t know if I would be able to accept or truly “hear” all of the positive feedback–but I sincerely hope that all of these responses do indeed make you feel encouraged, and I hope that the self-loathing, hyper critical voice that you struggle with isn’t loud enough to drown out all of the good things that people have written about you in these responses. Because you deserve to feel and enjoy the warmth from these strangers on the internet; you really do.
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“I didn’t want them to see how much I needed to be touched, how much I enjoyed just having an elbow brush against somebody else. It was so warm. I didn’t want people to know that it felt different to me than it did to them. I didn’t want them to think I was taking advantage of them, getting something out of their thoughtless touches that they hadn’t intended to give me.”
I’ve been in an asexual marriage for many years now. This is how it feels.
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I’m always excited when posts from you come up in my reader, even though it takes me forever to actually set aside the time they deserve to read them. The honesty and insight into your life are really profound and I feel like m own life is always enriched by reading what you have to share. As several other commenters have already noted, you are an incredible inspiration, and you come up in my own mind as a bar to strive for in terms of strength of character. Also echoing the sentiment of really wanting to give you a hug, all the more so if gestures like that are still as meaningful as they were during the times you write about as an urge brought out of extreme respect for you and a genuine hope for a future filled with nothing but better things for you.
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Friendship is hard and I can understand how you would come to understand it in terms of an economy. I understand friendship in terms of relationships being reciprocal. Each party needs to feed it but it is more of a gift economy than careful exchanges.
I’m sorry that life gave you such fucked upness for so long.
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If you are ever in the DC area, I’d be down for hanging out. I might not be able to relate to your pajama situation, but I will certainly throw myself into conversations about J. Marion Sims. I was a mental health case worker too, so people talking about how hard their day was when the email system is down is always cute.
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I’m a little late to the party in expressing my appreciation for your blog in general and this post in particular, but this post hit me like a hammer and I’ve needed a little time to let it all sync in.
I had been reading a few of your articles on sexism, and I really enjoy your ability to get to the root of an issue, breaking it all down in logical steps without losing the audience. It’s inspired me a lot, and made me think about what’s lacking in my own writing, and maybe hint at a way forward through my writer’s block.
I had built up an image of you as one of the… normal people. The neurotypical. The confident. The unattainable. Them.
And then I read this, and well, damn. This is the first time I’ve ever read anything about someone else experiencing some of the same things I did while growing up. There are differences of course, but overall it’s spot on. I couldn’t be more different from you — half a world away, different language, but… damn.
I do feel better for it, though. Please keep doing what you do so well.
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Ah ha ha ha! Ohhhh, amused. No, but seriously? A lot of people make this mistake. They listen to my tone and they don’t listen to the words, because I’ve made such an effort over the years to have the perfect tone so that nobody looks behind it. I worked my ass off to look totally okay and strong and together, and as a reward, I ended up without a support network, because why would I need support? I think maybe I ought to start being a terrific mess more often.
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J:
Don’t I know it. I am frequently amazed when co-workers say things like “But you seem so confident in meetings!” I think it’s the medication; it suppresses most of the visible shaking that would otherwise give me away.
And you’re right, the downside of appearing calm and capable and being good at your job is that everyone assumes that you can cope. I’ve never regretted showing a vulnerable side to my (few) friends, but I’ve built up such an instinct for hiding my wounds from others that I find it almost impossible.
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you’re not terminally fucked up.
man, i wish i could send a real hug through the internet. and also try to teach you what friendship is like – one blunder at a time. even “normal” people (NOT that i’m claiming to be one…) can have a terribly hard time with friendships… i feel incredibly blessed that some of mine have managed to make it, despite imploding time and time again.
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