In No Way Usual

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Recent events have led me to ponder the concept of friendship to a greater extent than I normally do, and I normally contemplate it a lot. Ever since I made friends in the face of social hopelessness, I have been trying to understand it. Pondering it though I do, there is no escaping an underlying reality that my perspective on friendship is in no way usual.

Friends of mine often become confused when I say I never had a friend in the world until I turned 18, because people from Harrison pop up as kids whose houses I would frequent, who attended my birthday parties, who I even went to sleepovers with and such. What is important to understand about the idea of me being friendless for so long is it all depends upon a particular point of view. Here I am thinking of Obi-Wan Kenobi's description of Darth Vader murdering Anakin Skywalker as his way of putting Anakin falling from grace and becoming Darth Vader. While it is true that I associated with other kids growing up in such manners, this need not be viewed as friendships. They tended to fall into one of three categories.

1). People who would simply tolerate me hanging around them even though they weren't really my friends. These people had their varying motives, which included having a whipping boy around, being tied to me through their parents working with or for my family, or people who were simply too nice, or insincerely polite as I would put it, to tell me to go away even though their patience was wearing ever thinner.

2). People who were unable to choose to get away from me for various reasons. These reasons usually involved our families being close, being in school together a lot, or simply living in my neighborhood where their mom would let me in their home much to their chagrin.

3). People who could've genuinely been my friend if I wasn't so used to social alienation that I completely rejected the notion. These sorts generally came along later in childhood after the others had calloused me.

So that's your answer to how I can say I never had a friend for the first 18 years of my life. Certainly nothing I've described above advanced my social skills any. So when I got to college I was literally starting out making the sorts of social bonds with my peers that most people start doing around four. It's been nine years since then, so it's fair to say I have the social development of a 13-year-old. I'm just that behind, and you can't rush through and play make-up. You've got to learn at the same pace everybody else did. So the drama plays out through the years.

During college I had at least three, possibly four, distinct social circles I went through. Informally, I refer to them as the punk geniuses, evangelicals, gamer group 1, and gamer group 2. There's some crossover, with only one person spanning all four, but the point I'm making is that I'm used to friend turnover by now. People just grow apart whether that be over realizing you're hanging out with misogynistic elitist dickheads, differing over theology with fundamentalist hellfire obsessed Kool-Aid drinkers, or realizing you must get away from your batshit crazy DM and his followers. People came and went and the cream always stuck around and rose to the top. Back in the day friendship made sense to me. Now it's different.

What's different? I've had a real social life for nearly a decade now and I still don't know how to make friends. This wasn't exactly what I'd call obvious for a long time after moving down here to Fayetteville. Basically, what I think happened was college is an automatic friend factory that I never left for seven years. Friendships are there for the taking and it's like fishing in a fishery tank. Out here in the real world and a new city, well, that's different. It's more like public school growing up. Whether you're in the workplace or some other adult social setting, you are fundamentally surrounded with people dissimilar to you who have no interest in you. Attempting to befriend people in the general populace with no experience is advisable only if you're curious to find out how much people can hate someone they don't even know.

So now I live as a hermit and I'm blowing on my two local friendships as if they were the last embers in a fire that I need to make sure to keep going. Maybe I can't make new friends, but I can sure try and keep the old friendships in a state of good repair. Watching so many of my oldest friends go away in a fury of hateful messages and blocking certainly makes me hold precious all of what I've got left. One of my local friends has been stalwart enough that I'm pretty sure all the empathy and compassion I lack somehow all went to her. The other has got some weekly backyard cookouts going on, maybe, that could be a sublime ritual. I'm not sure either of them will ever understand what they do for me. As they rail against my cynicism and misanthropy, their treatment of me does more than anything keep me feeling connected to humanity and to thaw the block of ice my heart has become a bit.

Back when playgrounds made daily life intolerable, I used to stand in some unoccupied part of them and stare off into the horizon. Forest Heights back then was surrounded by a whole lot of nothing, and as I looked into that nothing, I often imagined fantastic worlds or myself with superpowers, and that hasn't changed. Sometimes though, I would imagine a life like my own, but better for having friends in it. Rationality does not always dominate any mind. Though I knew connections with peers based upon compassion, forgiveness, mercy, tolerance, intellect, good humor, and simple kindness were an impossibility, I still fantasized about them. Were I able to speak to that little boy, I do not know what I would tell him. Should I tell him of the wonders of real friendship and that, for a time at least, he will know them? Shall I tell him of all the knives in the back, the guys who will have affairs with women he dates, or that he will one day have rape and bullying of the defenseless defended to him by ones who would claim the title of friend to him? How to reconcile the two truths? If you know, tell me. In the meantime, the guard is up, the heart is a solid block of ice, but perhaps some small part of that child looking off into the distance hoping for friendships based upon forgiveness, compassion, mercy, tolerance, intellect, good humor, and simple kindness survives within me. Perhaps I can't kill the damn little blonde boy no matter how I try, and oh how I have.

-Frank

Well I'm a complete newbie here -- but I can definitely relate. In my case, it's the total "Wrong Planet" package. I feel like I should be someone who has a gazillion friends -- to myself, I'm one of the most friendly, fun-loving, sociable people that I know.

But one step out the door and I realize that the planet that I live on is made up of people that are tremendously different than the people that I picture myself being friends with. Even though I live in a big city full of highly educated people, they still have a very difficult time -- apparently -- understanding and relating to me.

And if -- as I suspect you do -- you judge who is a "friend" by who would choose you as a favorite person to spend time with, then I definitely am in the same boat with no real friends.