on being social

My antisocial mood moments have been on the rise lately.

Not that I don't want to be social... but I don't feel like starting things, although I somehow find myself in a position of doing so sometimes anyway. I have a housewarming coming up this weekend and I'm somewhat dreading whatever I've gotten myself into because I have no idea what to expect of it. I haven't really planned it out that much yet.

Some friends lately have called me a "social butterfly" or whatever because it seems like I'm out and about all the time... but to be honest, I don't really feel it at all. Maybe I do a good job of putting events on my schedule together so it seems like I'm always busy and not available, but as it went with my last busy weekend, at every event I show up to with more than maybe 3 or 4 people, I generally end up feeling out of place or just there, which probably shows itself most by my tendency to be quiet and just sit there and space out while everyone else is talking. It makes me wonder at those times why I'm really there to begin with, other than maybe "keeping up the appearance" of being around people. I even distinctly recall an (inebriated) person I was walking home once from an event tell me, "I was surprised to see you here... You're a pretty quiet person." Which lends itself into why I don't consistently hang out with most people on a regular basis... and why everyone seems find me busy all the time.

[On a random note, Ryan mentioned recently that when we first started going to class together... a semester after meeting, I didn't really say anything until he mentioned Smash Bros once. Funny how circumstances change like that. If anything, my experiences pretty much tell me that I take a long time to befriend most people after meeting them.]

It astounds me how I am capable of interacting with people sometimes. The conversations I have often tend to feel out of sync with whatever is going on in my head at the moment or in general, although parts of it will come out in gushes, like if the game I'm preoccupied with happens to come up. (I'm still on a game binge by the way.) But really, I've sat in front of a mirror before and wondered if the person I can see is the same person everyone else sees when they interact with me. It's like I'm just doing a decent job of putting up a facade for communicating with people somehow, when inside I have something else completely different on my mind, and at that moment I just want to be left to my own devices, which is generally what happens at work for me anyway. I usually have this filter on that blocks out most of what's been going on in my head when I talk to people, or else I imagine I'd be a lot more melodramatic and emotional all the time. I've actually contemplated making a private twitter to document the random tangential thoughts that enter my head sometimes... but there's a reason why I don't reveal these things to people.

All that said, I don't hate interacting with people - I actually enjoy listening to others a lot - I just find it tiring to keep up with everyone. Which is why I guess the relationships that have flourished the most for me are the ones that don't require the upkeep of having to talk everyday or even that often, the ones that don't have me worrying if they're still there or not just because we haven't hung out in a while (and oftentimes I feel like I have to be the one to initiate anyway). I appreciate being able to enjoy a good day with someone even if we haven't talked for months or years - and in fact it's starting to feel more normal for me now. (I'm probably repeating myself here.)

On another note, there's a lot going on in our heads during social interaction that we take for granted. About a year ago I was sitting in on a group session for high schoolers with disorders on the autism spectrum (long story) and a lot of the topics covered by the teacher felt somewhere between juvenile and common knowledge, when in reality for those students it really wasn't. Cues that most of us somehow manage to pick up through interactions and experiences had to be taught to these kids, made explicit for them by adults. And some of them were the victims of bullying and in one case was moving schools all the time for all the trouble he kept getting into... for not responding well to bullying. I have to admit, if I were in that situation I wouldn't know what to do either.

Looking at it all, it reminded me of experiences I'd almost forgotten from a long time ago, back when I was still in middle school and wasn't really friends with anyone in my class. I don't remember why, but when I was younger I'd already developed a habit of watching other kids play on the playground, but not really joining in with them on anything... or perhaps I did a few times, but I don't remember much of it. After a while I'd developed a habit of living in my own world at recess, playing on the playground by myself while make believing stuff like a scenario where all of the buildings and cars near me were boats traveling in parallel on a huge river, somewhere, while mostly ignoring whatever else was going on at recess. Come to think of it, there were a few people I did interact with early on, but all of them wound up moving to different schools at some point or were in the younger grades, and those relationships didn't keep for long.

This kept on until my teacher at the time noted my lack of social activity at recess/lunch to my parents at a parent-teacher conference, and then the next thing I knew we had assigned tables per grade at lunch, and then somehow I made friends with the people in my class who sat at the same table as me... who I vaguely recalled choosing to sit with in the first place because I found them least cumbersome to deal with... I don't know what was going on in my head at the time. There was one time one of them even told me to go away, which really upset me and I think I was almost ready to give up on having friends, but somehow we wound up being good friends a year later due to random circumstances and luck I guess, and I don't think that person would remember this anyway. Well, kids tend to be pretty fickle at that age in general.

The point of that all being, being social is a lot harder (for some of us at least) than we generally give it credit for. And I even have a tendency to prefer to distance myself away from people who aren't that social or seem uncomfortable to be around, despite the fact that those people are as in much need of community and friendship as anyone else and oftentimes have a lot of insight into things that the rest of us don't really notice in life. I keep having to remind myself that every time I find myself in social situations, both where I'm the one with the privilege of extending a hand out to people and where I'm the one who feels excluded or left out. Even when it turns out that there's isn't an easy way to integrate some people with a community, because they don't happen to fit in for some reason like they make others uncomfortable, and it isn't usually clear how exactly one can fix this issue.

And the advent of instant messaging and texting and facebook and all of that just makes this even more complicated. Most of the time I don't give it as much thought or worry like I used to when I was younger and suffered from instant messaging anxiety, but I still feel uncomfortable sometimes when people don't respond in a timely fashion (or just ever) due to the lack of cues in these forms of communication that would be accessible in physical interaction. Not that physical interaction is that much better, though... I guess I can still be oblivious to when people actually don't really like me, for one thing. I'm assuming there are people out there who still don't based off of past history, but whatever... It's not like that knowledge would change much, and you can't please everyone anyway.

I still have moments every week where I just feel like cutting off contact with everyone and keeping to myself, because it's easier that way than having to deal with the anxiety and the unnecessary worrying I often exhibit when it comes to the prospect of keeping up with people and not knowing what to do in social situations I'm not comfortable with, as they happen all the time. But I have to remind myself that these ties and relationships are worth it in the long run, because they're part of what makes this life worth living.

Now excuse me while I go off and be anti-social for a while thanks to my sickness. I think I ate some bad leftovers yesterday and I've been feeling queasy all day... and couldn't sleep last night due to a combination of sleeping early and waking up in the middle of the night and being too awake to fall asleep + it being too hot + random joint and back aches + migraine level headaches from getting too little sleep and then napping too much + my mind being unstable in such conditions and experiencing a half-awake existential mid-life crisis. I really should take better care of myself. sigh.