“Living your best life”, “Living well is the best revenge” and the thousand variations thereof.
There’s a lot of emphasis on living for show in this time of the world, and along with it comes the popular concept of what that is- most of it revolving around friends that serve as one another’s diaries.
Yeah, I don’t have one of those. In fact, I don’t even have anyone in my life that I could call up and say, hey wanna get coffee after four? I used to blame this on the fact that 90% of my relationships are virtual in nature, and then I remembered that even when the people I was closest to WERE local, I saw them maybe every other weekend. Maybe.
It’s not that I don’t love the people in my life and enjoy their company, I very much do. And I miss them when it’s been weeks/months since we’ve come together. It’s that at some point I got tired of the being the resident female who expended the emotional energy to make gatherings happen and I spend a lot of my life inside my own head, doing my own thing. There’s a reason my husband and I can sit in contented silence for hours on end apparently doing nothing- we’re both that way.
And all of that is just fine by me… most of the time. Til I hit ‘evidence’ that this is not the societal norm, that this is not okay and it makes me abnormal, qualifies me for Quasimodo outcast status, and is just wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.
But Ari, what does that? you ask. Well, how about any commercial that shows a bunch of ladies out together critiquing clothes? Or guys out having brewskis? Or any family gathering greater than 4 people? (At this point in my strange life, I only have 3 members of my extended family that I interact with on a regular basis, after all). Social media is also a goldmine of all these happy gatherings.
That’s when I understood that the locus of my loneliness wasn’t 100% coming from within. Maybe about 5% of the time I wish I could sit down and talk to someone, and then I usually reach for a technology based connection point.
But the 95% of feeling like I’m isolated or missing out? It comes from outside of myself.. and I don’t see it until I ask myself if I’m truly content being where I am and would I make any kind of change.
I’m crochety and weird and have this delusion that I’m funny… I don’t have energy to expend on a lot of the things popular/social media wants to me to think I should. I have a long history of people who have taken advantage of me and the things I used to do to feel like I was like everyone else.
I’ve come to accept that there is no ‘like everyone else’. I’m just me, and I like me, I like my life, and I like the people that I’ve made welcome in my space. I’m not here to impress people I knew in high school on Instagram. I’m not here to rub in all the great parts of my life that my ex’s are missing.
It’s freeing to be just you, just doing the things you do. Highly recommended.
You know, if that’s what you want.
Curiouser and Curiouser 