Gotta deal with my head better

[jbsegal]

Really, I've gotta get better about the feeling that, on any given night that I've got nothing happening and that others are not similarly at loose ends, that I'm being actively excluded from whatever it is that's happening

Comments

[aliothsan]

Ouch. Just be careful that you don't fall into "I'm excluded because people are unaware I exist". It's better than "I'm excluded because people dislike me" or "I'm excluded because I get prioritized out of finite invitation lists", but it's still no good. (A local rather than absolute extremum, perhaps.)

[jbsegal]

The 1st isn't my ... worry isn't the right term... stress point?

The 2nd and 3rd really are more where my head goes to, sadly.

[aliothsan]

Oops, I wasn't clear. What happened to me was I was stuck on the 2nd and 3rd, and fell to the 1st because it was an improvement, however small. But from there it's hard to get to "It doesn't concern me that I have 'nothing to do' tonight", which is the place to be. The 1st is like a small dimple in a potential-energy landscape, one that isn't the absolute minimum. You have to increase your energy again to get out of it.

[76trombones]

Yeah, it's good to get to that place. (Well, there might be cases where the lack of things-to-do on given night is part of a pattern of not having enough socialization overall, but I suspect all three of us are busy enough that we don't actually have that problem

[quietann]

You could be us, who didn't know about *anything* going on tonight. We went to see Enchanted, which was a rather lovely, silly movie.

[jbsegal]

Tonight, I actually don't know of a thing that's happening... I am starting to suspect, from other folks' LJ burblings, that there were things, but really, I don't know what/where/who/etc.

[jadia]

Often a good solution to feeling excluded is to just start trying to organize your own events, so you get to do the excluding instead? :-) I can't say I've tried it and it's worked, but I've successfully felt less excluded when I *thought* about organizing my own things and *intended* to....

[macthud]

Yeah.

When you figure this out, whether it's via chemicals or hypnosis or whatever, let me know, eh?

It's weekends like this one, where the invitations and options are lacking, when I really hate the glut of options for things like New Year's Eve. It would have made me much happier to not surf that night, and have a party or two this weekend.

I find it's easier (and likely more true) to convince myself it's not active exclusion when the host(s) of today's event have recently included me in something.

It's doubly *hard* to do that, and doubly painful, when I've recently hosted, instigated, or just attended an event where the host(s) were included and seemed to have a good time with me... That's when I start falling into the (too real, then) high school fear and loathing of two-facedness.

(P.S. Because it seems worth saying, my weekend has remained solo and homebody. I'll likely be leaving the house tomorrow, but that's more about needing half-n-half and other necessities than it is about the social. More's the pity)

[anonymous]

I am SOOOOOOOOOO tempted to say, "Oh, JB. It's just that you're 40 now and everyone you know, being commensurately old and decrepit, is not off having fun without you; no, it's just that your age cohort has gone and variously reproduced or become unable to stay up past 8 pm or in other ways turned so boring they are *embarrassed* to have you *see* them like this," just because it is so much fun to rag on you for angst I largely dispatched a decade or two ago. Anyway, it is the weekend after New Year's; there probably *isn't* anything happening for you to be left out of. And I promise, if I had a life, I would invite you to the events in it.

Aged Lauren