It's Been A Long Time Coming
WARNING: long, confusing, vague, and possibly self-pitying rant ahead.
The status of Friend has always been a sacred one to me though it is one of those nigh unto mystical connections, like unto “mate” and “lover,” which have been a source of great joy but even greater confusion. The confusion has recently been added to by 3.7 pints of consternation and it’s such that it has taken me a month of squinky moodiness to even identify my quandary and no answers are in sight.
You, the reader, may have noticed that I capitalize the word “Friend.” Folks sling “friendship” about like it was something you could pick up at the dollar store with change to spare and it has become such a casual statement that it is frequently offensive to tell a person they do not qualify as a friend. Since “kith” went out of style before I was born and “water brother” is a little more intense, and obscurely referential, than most folks are comfortable with you’re simply going to have to understand that I am stuck using a word which may not best suit the subject I am discussing. Suggestions for more appropriate labels are welcomed, but maybe I should give you a notion of what the hell I’m talking about first.
The response that I have to the folks who will become Friends is a thing that raises awe and terror in me. I have always been a creature of strong emotions, which has led me to keep most folks at a safe distance out of respect for their emotional safety and my own. Every so often I encounter a person who bypasses most of my defenses through the simple act of being. I never know who these people will be and the part of my mind in charge of choosing them sits just above my brain stem and uses a set of criteria that is completely unknown to the conscious part of my self that we call "me." Suffice it so say that, like pornography and art, I know it when I see it.
I am suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to know everything about this person from their favorite flavor of jelly bean to their deepest fear, and have the corresponding urge to try and tell them everything there is to know about myself. I wish to grok them. My response to this impulse is to become terrified, paranoid, and neurotic as hell. Nothing is so dangerous to me as a person I desire to become close to; the more I care about a person the more they can hurt me and I am painfully aware of this. Yet not even my fear and loathing of being emotionally vulnerable to a stranger seems to be enough to keep me from the attempt; the bond is too rare and precious.
To clarify: I do not refer to mere curiosity (which I have in spades for nearly anything you care to mention) and I am not describing a thing which happens to me frequently. If I am lucky I typically acquire a new Friend roughly once a year. Most folks are unaware of the degree to which I experience social anxiety because for every ounce of fear some god gave me an ounce of pure stubborn and I am too proud to cower in my home and let life pass me by; terror be damned! If I go through the anxiety, cold sweats, panic attacks, and crying jags necessary to actually initiate contact and socialize with a new person on a regular basis then there is a powerful motivation lending me strength.
There is a part of me that wonders, as with so many other things, if such intense fascinations are healthy. If they did not so frequently yield a solid and beloved kith I might actually have taken steps to prune this compulsion from my personality. To be strung up between my most potent fears and such a powerful and irrational attraction never fails to drive me into a nervous fit and it’s a source of wonder to me that I didn’t convince the Family (family by choice, not blood) in Rapid City that I was too crazy to be bothered with. Fortunately I seem to be a charismatic sort of crazy. Or at least pathetic enough to be cute.
Now I find myself confronted with an odd problem that I have never had to face before and which has been eating at the hind bits of my brain for months. When I form a new Friendship there has always been the possibility that this new person will become a lover. The line between those two states is thin at best and sometimes little more than a physiological technicality. Once I go through the painful emotional roller coaster of my own insecurities enough to allow an individual to become close to me all that is required is the added spark of chemistry and they easily change status. It happens frequently and I never really thought about it much; things weren’t broken so I had no desire to “fix” them. Now, for the first time in my life, I am presented with a situation in which I am beginning a friendship with a person that I can not permit myself to have erotic feelings for. The reasons for this are convoluted, not mine to share, and mildly soap-operatic in nature. The only important part is that the consequences for such emotions would quite possibly be such that I would find myself in a conflict which I would consider intolerable. With the perfect vision of hindsight I realize I have been keeping myself so wound up trying to insure that NOTHING above a PG rating slipped through my emotional filters that my sex drive in general has been lurching and stuttering as a result and my emotional state has suffered terribly. Upon examination it occurs to me that not a single one of my Friendships is completely platonic. There is always a certain amount of erotic banter and libidinous frisson even if neither of us ever intends to go anywhere with it. Apparently this is no news to those close to me but I seem to have gone years without realizing that all these trees indicated the presence of a forest. I can be a bit slow at times.
“So,” you may say, “Why the hells do you tell ME about this?” Touché. There is some comfort in venting frustrations out into the ether that is the World Wide Web, like shouting into the ocean, and I always have derived a certain perspective from writing things and setting them loose on the world, but I suppose a part of me is also hoping for an echo. I have never before encountered a situation wherein an erotic response to one of my Friends would be a bad thing. I purposefully set up my life to avoid this. I’ve no idea how to progress with the friendship while keeping myself emotionally and libidinously healthy AND keep sex completely out of it. I also can’t bring myself to abort such a rare and cherished connection, especially now that I am a stranger in a strange land and feel the pain of having the Family so far away.
Perhaps the only surprising thing is that I have never encountered this problem before.
I feel rather like I swallowed a batch of live crawdads.
The status of Friend has always been a sacred one to me though it is one of those nigh unto mystical connections, like unto “mate” and “lover,” which have been a source of great joy but even greater confusion. The confusion has recently been added to by 3.7 pints of consternation and it’s such that it has taken me a month of squinky moodiness to even identify my quandary and no answers are in sight.
You, the reader, may have noticed that I capitalize the word “Friend.” Folks sling “friendship” about like it was something you could pick up at the dollar store with change to spare and it has become such a casual statement that it is frequently offensive to tell a person they do not qualify as a friend. Since “kith” went out of style before I was born and “water brother” is a little more intense, and obscurely referential, than most folks are comfortable with you’re simply going to have to understand that I am stuck using a word which may not best suit the subject I am discussing. Suggestions for more appropriate labels are welcomed, but maybe I should give you a notion of what the hell I’m talking about first.
The response that I have to the folks who will become Friends is a thing that raises awe and terror in me. I have always been a creature of strong emotions, which has led me to keep most folks at a safe distance out of respect for their emotional safety and my own. Every so often I encounter a person who bypasses most of my defenses through the simple act of being. I never know who these people will be and the part of my mind in charge of choosing them sits just above my brain stem and uses a set of criteria that is completely unknown to the conscious part of my self that we call "me." Suffice it so say that, like pornography and art, I know it when I see it.
I am suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to know everything about this person from their favorite flavor of jelly bean to their deepest fear, and have the corresponding urge to try and tell them everything there is to know about myself. I wish to grok them. My response to this impulse is to become terrified, paranoid, and neurotic as hell. Nothing is so dangerous to me as a person I desire to become close to; the more I care about a person the more they can hurt me and I am painfully aware of this. Yet not even my fear and loathing of being emotionally vulnerable to a stranger seems to be enough to keep me from the attempt; the bond is too rare and precious.
To clarify: I do not refer to mere curiosity (which I have in spades for nearly anything you care to mention) and I am not describing a thing which happens to me frequently. If I am lucky I typically acquire a new Friend roughly once a year. Most folks are unaware of the degree to which I experience social anxiety because for every ounce of fear some god gave me an ounce of pure stubborn and I am too proud to cower in my home and let life pass me by; terror be damned! If I go through the anxiety, cold sweats, panic attacks, and crying jags necessary to actually initiate contact and socialize with a new person on a regular basis then there is a powerful motivation lending me strength.
There is a part of me that wonders, as with so many other things, if such intense fascinations are healthy. If they did not so frequently yield a solid and beloved kith I might actually have taken steps to prune this compulsion from my personality. To be strung up between my most potent fears and such a powerful and irrational attraction never fails to drive me into a nervous fit and it’s a source of wonder to me that I didn’t convince the Family (family by choice, not blood) in Rapid City that I was too crazy to be bothered with. Fortunately I seem to be a charismatic sort of crazy. Or at least pathetic enough to be cute.
Now I find myself confronted with an odd problem that I have never had to face before and which has been eating at the hind bits of my brain for months. When I form a new Friendship there has always been the possibility that this new person will become a lover. The line between those two states is thin at best and sometimes little more than a physiological technicality. Once I go through the painful emotional roller coaster of my own insecurities enough to allow an individual to become close to me all that is required is the added spark of chemistry and they easily change status. It happens frequently and I never really thought about it much; things weren’t broken so I had no desire to “fix” them. Now, for the first time in my life, I am presented with a situation in which I am beginning a friendship with a person that I can not permit myself to have erotic feelings for. The reasons for this are convoluted, not mine to share, and mildly soap-operatic in nature. The only important part is that the consequences for such emotions would quite possibly be such that I would find myself in a conflict which I would consider intolerable. With the perfect vision of hindsight I realize I have been keeping myself so wound up trying to insure that NOTHING above a PG rating slipped through my emotional filters that my sex drive in general has been lurching and stuttering as a result and my emotional state has suffered terribly. Upon examination it occurs to me that not a single one of my Friendships is completely platonic. There is always a certain amount of erotic banter and libidinous frisson even if neither of us ever intends to go anywhere with it. Apparently this is no news to those close to me but I seem to have gone years without realizing that all these trees indicated the presence of a forest. I can be a bit slow at times.
“So,” you may say, “Why the hells do you tell ME about this?” Touché. There is some comfort in venting frustrations out into the ether that is the World Wide Web, like shouting into the ocean, and I always have derived a certain perspective from writing things and setting them loose on the world, but I suppose a part of me is also hoping for an echo. I have never before encountered a situation wherein an erotic response to one of my Friends would be a bad thing. I purposefully set up my life to avoid this. I’ve no idea how to progress with the friendship while keeping myself emotionally and libidinously healthy AND keep sex completely out of it. I also can’t bring myself to abort such a rare and cherished connection, especially now that I am a stranger in a strange land and feel the pain of having the Family so far away.
Perhaps the only surprising thing is that I have never encountered this problem before.
I feel rather like I swallowed a batch of live crawdads.