…is the title of the first Lemonheads record,* and any direct relevance it has to this post is a little tricky for me to write about because if anyone still reads this blog—and I have my serious doubts about that—they are my friends, or at least people I know.
But I’m having serious issues with friendship, and specifically with some of my longest-standing friendships, right now. “Longest-standing,” in this case, includes people I’ve known for about eight or nine years, I guess, which for me is practically the equivalent of a lifelong friendship for many people; I’m always amazed by and envious of people who are still friends with folks they’ve known since high school or grade school or whatever, because I’m sure not.
In fact, I’m worse at maintaining friendships for any length of time than anyone I’ve ever met. One of my best friends from high school stays in sporadic touch despite my failure to reciprocate in any sort of timely fashion, and the same goes for some of my friends from my just-post-college days in Austin, TX, but that’s about it. I don’t think I’ve talked to any of my college friends since 1990, the year my first husband and I got married. I have a stalwart friend and former co-worker from my Minneapolis years who refuses to let me drop out of his life entirely, and I’m grateful beyond words for that, especially since the rest of my Mpls. friends** finally gave up on me a year or so ago.
With a couple of notable and still painful exceptions,*** my friendships usually end because of distance or a sort of natural growing apart (at least, I think that kind of thing is natural; I am so bad at friendship and human contact in general that I honestly don’t know), not because of fights or one of us suddenly deciding we hate the other or really any active hostility. And maybe that’s an entirely typical experience, especially for someone who’s changed major aspects of life as frequently as I have; like I said, I don’t really understand the way friendship works for other people, so I don’t know for sure. Maybe it’s just that I take it harder than I should when friendships change or dissolve. But of all my many personality failings—and there are a lot of them—I’ve always considered my inability to sustain/manage/”do” friendships the biggest and most damaging of them.
Sometimes I think it’s because I’m such a loner, but then again, sometimes I wonder if it’s the other way around, if I’m a loner because I avoid human contact because I’m so awful at it. I know that when I’m in social situations for more than an evening, I need to hide for days, sometimes weeks, afterwards. I don’t know if that’s something I should be actively concerned about and trying to change, or if it’s okay that I just need time to myself after time with other people; it’s just another of those things about human contact that I don’t seem to get.
And okay, I’m not saying I hate my current crop of friends. (I wouldn’t say that even if I felt it, because it would be bad manners to say the least.) But this weekend, in the company of several of the ones I’m ostensibly closest to, I had what I sometimes think of as a “Bye Bye Blackbird” moment, because of the lyric “No one here can love or understand me…”: I was talking and laughing and drinking and apparently having fun with all of them throughout the weekend, but by Saturday night, it had gradually started to feel like pretty much none of them understood or even knew or cared about me. (Yes, I know how self-pitying that sounds, and is, and I hate sounding that way; one reason I sometimes think I really do need to become a hermit is that I don’t like myself when I’m self-pitying—does anyone?—and I think it’s a good idea for me to avoid people and things and situations that make me not like myself.)
The feeling subsided some, especially after a totally painless and non-fraught short social encounter with someone not in that crowd later in the weekend, but it didn’t pass entirely, and it hasn’t yet. I don’t think any one thing or person triggered it, and I can’t put my finger on why or when I started feeling that way, but I did, and it wasn’t fun, boy howdy. It didn’t make me not like the people involved, but it threw me, badly. Driving home from St. Louis, I spent most of the 225 miles in tears, because I was suddenly starting to think about tossing my whole life out the window yet again and moving somewhere else and not knowing any of the people I know now.
I’m not going to do that, and even when I was feeling like doing it I knew I wasn’t going to do it or even seriously entertain the idea of doing it, because despite my apparent inability to learn from my previous mistakes, evidently one thing I have successfully learned after doing it one too many times is that just throwing out my current life and moving to a different city is something I can’t do anymore; the fact that I was able to do it successfully twice was just a very lucky fluke, because the plain fact is that is just doesn’t work.
Maybe it was just that I was tired; certainly, a few days of sleep deprivation plus a bunch of Red Bull couldn’t have helped me feel calm and serene. Maybe it’s that I’m a little depressed again. The euphoria created by changing jobs has definitely worn off; I still really love my job and the people I work with are great, but the inevitable realization that making one extremely positive change in life doesn’t make the whole rest of my life all better has hit. Maybe it’s all hormones, who knows. Maybe it’s just that drinking more than a drink or so really doesn’t work for me anymore (actually, it’s definitely that in some small measure; one thing I figured out decisively this weekend is that I really don’t enjoy being drunk or being around people who are drunk). I don’t know, and I’m not going to make any rash pronouncements about anything for a while, till I’ve had some time to process what exactly is bugging me about my friendships at the moment. Except this one pronouncement, which really isn’t all that rash: I definitely need to have some friends whom I didn’t meet through the Internet. I’m not sure how I’m going to go about doing that; as terrible as I am at keeping friendships, I may be even worse at making them in the first place. But it’s something I need to figure out how to do.
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*That was when the Lemonheads were a really young little punk rock band and Evan Dando was the drummer rather than the frontman. I like both the pre- and the post-Dando-as-superstar versions of the band, in different ways.
**A particularly fine set of friends, which makes it especially sad that they gave up on me, but geez, it’s not like I can blame them. And not that I go around ranking the groups of friends from various phases of my life or anything, except that I do, and they were among my favorites.
***I think last year was the year I finally completely got over one of those exceptions, a best-friendship (the best friendship I’ll ever have, I think, which isn’t a reflection on later close friendships but just a result of my belief that you don’t form the same sorts of joined-at-the-hip friendships when you’re not a teenager that you do when you are) that ended, badly, in 1982. Marina. Maybe I’ll write about her at some point. I really am over it, but on the other hand, I can’t say I wouldn’t love to talk to her again someday.