One of the things I wanted to do in the new year (which is now a quarter done) is to widen my circle of, not friends, exactly, but acquaintances/cohorts/etc. Oh, yesterday’s post was a shambling mess. Expect more of the same today. I have not done this. Instead, I have just keenly felt more and more alone. I know my brain is broken (and my depression is getting worse) because I feel like no one loves me. And I objectively know this is not true. Yet, my brain weasels are whispering that maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t come back from dying (twice!).
By the way, I find it hilarious to say it that way. That I had died (twice!) with twice in parenths and an exclamation point following it. I can recite all the reasons why I know it’s not true (there are at least a half-dozen people whom I know love me and about a dozen more who would be sad if I were to disappear. That’s not many, but it’s still some.
And yet. I feel sad and lonely. It’s partly because I can’t comfortably drive. Not that I went out that much even before my medical crisis. But it’s hard not to look back and think that I should be further than I am now. Before I ended up in the hospital, things were opening up after the haze of the pandemic. I got my first vax and optimistically thought that I could go out and do things. Within the first month or two of going out, I caught walking (non-COVID-related pneumonia) and ended up in the hospital. That’s the short version.
Once the vax was available, I had high hopes. Right before the pandemic hit, I wanted to start dating. Or rather, I wanted to find a fuck buddy. Netflix and chill without the Netflix. I looked at my OKCupid profile, intending to clean it up and maybe get my bro to take new pics of me. And then I had my medical crisis and that took care of that.
A little over a year ago, I started thinking about it again. Then I had a personal tragedy (which I’m still not over yet), and I put it on the backburner yet again. While I would love to find someone to have sex with, it’s not at the top of my list of thinghs to do. I can tell because I’m not doing anything to find someone. There are many reasons for that, but the main one is that while I would like to have sex again, I don’t w ant to go through all the shit to find someone. I have other things that are more important to me.
One is to find a community of other genderqueer Asian queers, as I mentioned yesterday. One of my problems is that I tend to start adding all the things I want, which are basically people like me. Narcissistic? Yes. But also, it’s because I feel so unseen. This is putting aside the medical crisis because there is literally no one else w ho has gone thorugh what I have. People like to say there are no unique experiences, but this is simply not true.
I want queer with plenty of bi/pan people. I want agender/genderfluid/genderqueer rather than nonbinary. Asian, obviously, and that’s three specific traits that cuts down the possibilities drastically. Then, yes, let’s add people in their forties or older, and we might as well be looking for the mythical unicorn.
I could add other traits, but that’s enough to make it almost nobody. I mean, there have to be at least twenty of us in the whole country, but finding them is the issue.
Side note: I have a weird thing in which I will reach the end of something and then be completely done with it. Like websites and communities. It’s beacuse the things that irritate me in the beginning will still irritate me years in, but even more so. And because no one will have done anything about it, it bothers me more and more as time goes on.
This is my long-winded way of saying it’s time to find new communities. And to spread it out so that I don’t have to rely on any one community to give me what I need/want. It’s better to spread it around, but I have a hard time being a part of several communitties. It’s not just being an introvert. It’s not just not liking to be around people. It’s because it’s so hard for me to act like a ‘normal’ human being for hours on end.
In the Discord community I’m in, someone made a comment in the after dark channel that was crude, but that’s what the channel was for. It was in the vein of a longstanding joke that the content creators have with each other (and have for a decade), so while it’s not my kind of joke–it certainly fits within the parameters of the community. Except the person it was directed at took intense exception to it and snapped back in a very graphic way. I was shocked, honestly, because while the comment was in bad taste, the reaction came out of nowhere.
The guy who made the comment got scolded by a few of the regulars, and it seems the commenter might have left the Discord. The commenter wasn’t new, but had a different name. It got me thinking about how hard it is to discern the norms of a community sometimes. And how it can go really wrong when you stepped over an invisible line.
One of the people jumping into the discussion (harlshly) is someone whom I’ve noticed tends to go off on people they think have ‘weird’ comments. I also think they tend to do this when they are drunk, which is not ideal in my opinion. There is a cliquiness to the group that I’m not comfortable with–and as is often the case, the people in the in-group strenuously deny this is happening.
I am not in the in-group, but I’m not on the outs, either. I would say that I’m on the fringe. Accepted as a member, but not one of the cool kids, per se. I know all groups have their norms and rules, even if they are unspoken, but it’s so exhausting to try not to step out of line.
This is one reason I get tired of groups as time goes on. They don’t grow and change, and the rules harden into dicta–which is not my thing.
I will continue with this tomorrow.