To start, I’m okay being alone, but I sometimes try to take an objective look at myself. I try to understand how I think and do things the way I do.
If my brother didn’t live with me. I would probably live alone. I work from home and have infrequent meetings, outside of that I would probably have almost no interaction aside from the people I see doing my weekly grocery shopping. I have probably 2 or 3 people I could call a friend, and a few acquaintances, and all of them are previous coworkers. My interactions with them are generally constrained to discord chat. This is simply setting the stage, lets continue to set the stage for how did I get here?
If I’m being critical, I don’t know that I have ever had many/any friends. In grade school, I had neighbors who’s houses I would go over to, but I don’t think they ever came over to mine. I was a member of many clubs, but I didn’t really talk to any members outside of the club itself. After starting college, I think I might have kept in contact with one person from high school, but that was only once or twice. I haven’t talked to anybody from then for over 10 years.
Surely people from college, right? Well, again I was in the marching band and lived on campus, certainly many friends from there. Everybody in band has a friend right? Other than attending alumni events, and some volunteering, I don’t talk to any of them either.
So what does this all mean? Well I think I can say I can be alone in a room full of people. I can go to a meetup, after working though the anxiety that would keep me from attending, and leave after barely talking to anybody. I have anxiety that keeps me from going to events where other people would be, and if I do go, I have no idea how to interact. In general I would say I don’t really know how to start a conversation with others outside of a professional setting. I can respond in a conversation, but leading is out of the question. I’m bad enough at reading people in person, online I’m even worse. It takes effort for me to only say “fine, you?” instead of a full explanation in response to someone I know saying “hi, how’s it going” as a greeting.
I used to say I was an introvert, but I don’t even know if that’s true. I’d much rather do things with someone else than just alone, I just don’t have anyone to do it with. I just don’t want to be in a group of people having fun, and not knowing how to even start a conversation. Anyway, yep I’m lonely and usually okay with it.
For reading the above, here’s a silly music video with lots of cartoon violence (including cartoon death) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-atRsitNsY Song is let your love flow by the Bellamy Brother and animation is by Tirrelous
It’s also just hard to make/keep friends in the digital age. My only advice would be to make active effort in building and keeping relationships, and not to be passive in hoping people will stay around. I’m often guilty of zoning out for a few months and forgetting a lot of my friends exist. Social anxiety sucks.
As far as the digital age goes, Facebook started to become a thing towards the end of high school. I didn’t have one then because I had no one I would want to add. I didn’t need a service to talk with people I saw every day. After that, I still never really saw the point. I would just get annoyed when things were only organized in Facebook groups.
I think instant messengers were a thing (AIM) a bunch of people were on, but my family had dial up well into high school so not a whole lot of time there except for working on projects. This account here is probably my first attempt at interacting online outside of coworkers I keep in contact with.Yeah I don’t really use social media, I just use chat rooms and PMs with people I already know.
I can relate to a lot of this. I think much of it is a cycle - not engaging in a conversation because of social anxiety and as a result not gaining the necessary experience to improve, so it continues. The only way out is to push yourself, even when it’s uncomfortable. Just say what comes to your mind, don’t overthink things. I’m trying to get better at it myself.
As a side note, I’ve met the Tirrel (the animator of that video) in passing in real life. They seem really nice :3
@OmegaMouse @l_b_i
But what do you do if you are somewhat autistic and most people consider your clumsy attempts to get in conversation as repulsing, leading to more isolation from their sideIf anyone actually feels that way (repulsed by your conversation), then they’re not a good person and you should try to find better friends… But perhaps they don’t actually feel that way, and it’s something that your anxiety is convincing you is the case when it isn’t? I think we tend to assign too much weight to our perception of how others judge us, whereas in reality the other person is probably too hung up on what they’re going to say to actually notice or worry about our errors. Go out, be clumsy and make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes in real life.
@OmegaMouse
They are not friends, they are the people to meet on munches or other events where i was trying to find friends and local buddiesEdit: and the repulsion is obviously seen as in they will not talk with me again or have me uninvited from future meetups
Did they say why they wouldn’t talk to you again?
For me at least, its just the attending that is the anxiety. The lack of speaking is not knowing what to say or having nothing to say and not knowing how to start a conversation with someone I don’t know.
That’s understandable. I think the anxiety will improve as you attend more. Are we talking about furmeets? In which case, make a list of things you could ask in advance. What’s your sona, how long have you been in the fandom, what kinda games do you play?
Wow, you’ve kinda described me in that post.
I’m not an expert and, like I said, I’ve been kinda lonely for most of my life. But I’ve come to find out some things that help me with social life.
The most important thing to do is just being yourself. After trying to analize the reason why social gatherings drain so much energy from me, I’ve found out that it’s usually trying to be someone that I’m not what tires me the most. Trying to seem more social, trying to control my nerd impulse of overexplaining things that aren’t relevant to the conversation, that kind of stuff.
Some people might find you awkward, but the truth is that if you need to “fake a personality” in order to be someone’s friend, that person isn’t really your friend.
The people that will actually stay with you and be friends with you will be the ones that like you as you are, and you can just be yourself with them. That usually drains a lot less social battery, and I’ve found that it’s way easier for them to understand when you don’t have the energy for meeting up.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly OK to have different “personalities”, and I have some filters even with the people I’ve met like this. But it just seems to me the less filters and personalities you have to keep, the easier it is to keep up a social relationship with someone.
I’m sorry for any possible grammar mistake, I’m on a mobile phone and I don’t have an autocorrect app. English is not my first language either, so I’m sorry for any weird expressions too.
I think one of the things that I can detect not just in your post, but in this entire thread, is just how fractured we are as a society. We’ve been separated and pushed apart in ways that make us easier to advertise to and consumerize. We are all broken people trying to cope with an increasingly frantic and atomized world. We’re anxious of socializing but we feel the void where it should or even just could be.
In some ways I find that the fandom can be incredibly helpful for meeting with and engaging with new people. Because of some of the lewder undercurrents, it’s actually very unappealing to commercial interests. If a major company thought they could make a lot of money selling branded fursuits, they would already be a thing.
But in other ways, it’s a bandaid for a chainsaw wound. Our society needs to shift, because we’re gripped with a massively unhealthy culture that is making us simultaneously more connected and more alone than ever. And that aloneness is really damaging to social creatures. It may not be the cause of what ails you, yes, you, the person reading this, but it is certainly not helping your situation.
What that change looks like, I can’t say. I have some thoughts and ideas, some of which you can probably glean from my tone and tenor here. But I’ll refrain from positing solutions. It wouldn’t do any good anyway. All I can say is that I hope that y’all can seek out those connections, make them, and hold them. They are truly one of the most valuable and precious things in the world right now. I understand your anxieties, OP, but if it helps, then one of the more revolutionary acts of today might just be making a friend. And if it doesn’t help you, then I hope it helps someone else who reads this down the line.
Sorry for the rant, this one kinda caught me at a weird moment and I really just wanted to get my loosely-related thoughts down.
