give strength to those who still remain

[bubblingbeebles]

a bunch of turmoil in my head has been settling over the past couple weeks about socially transitioning from undergrad culture to post-college life. this is a long-overdue post, but it's been a long-overdue sense of peace, too.

it... has left me a complete mess, at times. for all i'd heard about life being different once you graduate, i thought it wasn't going to be so bad, that i could just deal with each difference as it presented itself, but instead a bunch of things i didn't know how to deal with piled up and compounded and i was a poorly-designed building that grew a bunch of small stress fractures and subsequently couldn't deal with even a small earthquake. i had a huge meltdown about two weeks ago and have been delicately putting myself back together (and trying to find peace amidst the rubble) since then, hopefully more structurally-soundly this time around.

it should surprise nobody that i have trouble maintaining my sense of belonging. coming to CMU was actually great for me (though not in a personal growth sense, i suppose), since i found myself in the middle of the cohort, where we (i.e., various shifting subsets of us) reliably did everything together - go to classes, eat meals, do homework, do leisure, even walk across campus at 2 in the morning to get back to our dorm rooms. i never had to struggle with worrying that there was nobody who wanted to have me around; there was no shortage of encouragement being traded around for people to go out of their respective ways for each other.

even senior year, when the group started fragmenting a bunch, i never felt lost, or without a welcoming haven that i could fall back on. most of the people being actually wholly gone, though, has taken away a lot of my power to take care of myself that previously i'd taken for granted.

i've been running on a near-empty tank of "social fuel" basically this whole semester, which has caused me to notice a bunch of previously-invisible needs/assumptions i have about how socialisation works. (it also sometimes causes me to do undefined behaviour, like lashing out instead of properly communicating...) in my ever-over-analysing way, it's time to put it into text.

a few realisations:

1. my friendships are a higher priority than anything else in my life, even my work (conveniently, getting work done is highly temporally flexible), but this is not true for everyone.
   
2. i value more than ever now when people (whether local or many states away - usually the latter, though) show that they want to have conversations with me.
   
3. i have a strong need for a "shared hang-out space", where i can go spend time in, even doing solitary things (working), and be surrounded by people that i'd like to be spending time with anyway. even if nobody's talking, the possibility of looking up from my work to say something random and receive confirmation is a constant comfort.
   the 412 lab fills this role admirably, though it only keeps me in touch with some of the close friends who are still in town, so it feels like an incomplete solution. IRC fills this role too, though slightly less well; it lacks the constant confirmation that people are actually listening, but still provides a venue for e.g. no-effort dinner planning.
   the housemate thing really plays strongly into this. paul and i don't really interact much, so i don't at all feel like my house is a social haven where i can go when i want low-key company. it's a big hit to my "social fuel tank"'s fuel level, to not constantly have a fall-back option for people to do things together with. i've been growing more dependent on spending time, especially to get work done, at noble house (which dependence isn't alleviated by the way it smells exactly like tickybox); this itself even makes me feel self-conscious about "inviting myself over", though.
   
4. whether or not i have a shared hang-out space, i also have a strong need to hear from people out of the blue that they want to build friendship with me. this can be proposing mutually-interesting events, carrying a conversation, bringing up a past conversation or remark that i cared about, etc etc.
   failing a shared hang-out space, i feel extra need to seek this out, to maintain some sort of reliable constant contact as a substitute for the low-level contact that shared hang-out space provides.
   
5. i have a pretty intense fear of falling out of touch with close friends. i remember worrying about this back in sophomore year when i was watching all my senior friends graduate, and (as no surprise, for once) it's come back for a second round this year. i've been getting better at the "accepting impermanence" thing, but i still think my equilibrium point will turn out to be more attachment-heavy than for most people.
   
6. touch is hugely important to me. when i'm wearing "sadness goggles", i can contort even the most well-intended of words into something negative, but there's no questioning when someone hugs me, holds my hand, or rubs my back, that they enjoy my company. the cohort (and the rest of the kgb that it kept me in touch with) had a pretty strong cuddle culture, and i've been coming to terms with what comparatively little there is outside of it.
   

a few "undefined behaviours", which i'm really unproud of, that i end up in when i'm having a crisis of belonging:

1. when i hear about activities that i didn't know about / didn't get invited to, that friends i want to be spending more time with were involved in, i conclude that they don't care about seeing me.
   
2. for lack of a shared hang-out space, i feel compelled to boost how much i communicate about my availability / when i want to do group activities... and i expect everybody to match me in kind, and feel let down when this doesn't happen (and conclude, of course, that they don't care about seeing me).
   
3. when i feel worried about a friendship, i start "counting points" - "well, i could step out of my way to do something to make both of us happy, but have they done enough for me recently to earn me doing so?" this is stupid and frustrating and happens even in one-on-one conversations with people i completely trust, even on good days.
   
4. if i go out of my way to spend time with people, and it results in me getting invited to something in the future, it is still all too easy to think "i only got included for next time because i showed up and i was convenient; they don't actually actively want me". this one only really hurts when i'm already having a really bad day.
   

and some lessons i've mostly learned:

1. being especially more needy than basically anybody else i know (even without the unfulfilled-housemates-need handicap), i really do owe myself to go more out of my way than anybody else to communicate about socialising.
   
2. i have to pick up the ball when it's not in anybody's court, if i care about something happening. as more gratifying as it is when friends go out of their way for me, it does nobody any good to mope about it not happening (in fact, it's precisely the "need something, and it makes you less happy whether you get it or not" problem). put another way, feeling out of control of my life is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
   
3. if i want my friends to unconditionally love me in the face of my being depressed, i have to do the same to them first... as embarrassingly obvious as that sounds, it kind of goes out the window when i get upset and petty, and its implementation is sometimes pretty counter-intuitive for lack of self-social-confidence.
   
4. sometimes people really do just speak different social languages than me. i can try to learn their language and to teach them mine, or i can give up, but i'd better not tear myself up over it when i could instead be finding people who do speak my language.
   

man, these fat posts always take longer to write than i expect them to.