On The Friendship Lollipop:
How To Get Lost At Sea Without Even Trying
I read a lot of self help books these days. I moved to Los Angeles (California) exactly two years, one month, and… *checks calendar, does math, messes up math, tries again* four days ago. I left Chicago (Illinois) in the best physical shape of my life, but feeling stagnant in my career and needing a change. My social life was the best it had been in my entire life, but I was still hopeful I could be happier in LA (that’s what people call Los Angeles for short, it’s sort of a local thing). I didn’t hate Chicago, but I was getting tired and the weather was—and this will be a hot take for the ages, hold onto your homburgs—depressing. My two refrains had become “I could make more money being this miserable in an office career” and “I’d rather be miserable in California”. I was realistic, but I was also optimistic, which meant I was a fool. Once I left Chicago, pretty much 75% of the people I knew instantly lost my phone number. Like crossing over into Iowa created some sort of retroactive amnesia [DON’T FORGET TO INSERT A POLITICAL JOKE ABOUT THE 2020 DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES HERE]. I moved knowing a few people, hoping for a few shows, and having an idea of how I wanted to flourish in LA (again, this means Los Angeles, it’s shorter if I just say LA). Pretty much all of those fell through.
After about a year of reflection, I realized I had been obfuscating much of my own thoughts, feelings, actual self in a sort of millennial hustle like a shark constantly moving so it doesn’t have to deal with its mental health. Like sharks do. This resulted in stepping away from standup (see, it’s nicer if I say it like that and not “quitting and feeling like a failure” which is what I actually did), burrowing inside of my apartment, and gaining fifty pounds because I’m from Texas and I eat my feelings (funnily enough, the same happened when I moved to Chicago. It’s like I should have been prepared for that or something). I made some huge, sweeping life changes all at once (like is healthy), and became subsumed in the minutiae of my own being. So, you know, some real easygoing stuff. The biggest struggle through it all has been having a social life or some sort of support network.
When I was a child (like Baby Yoda, but with less eye contact) I was always very… let’s go with *spins the euphemism wheel* …eccentric. I’ve always fought a weird balance of not caring what other people think of me and being hyper-obsessed with what other people think of me. It’s really fun and I highly recommend it as a way of life. In elementary school there was a “We Hate Cod* Melcher Club”. They had a Treasurer. I guess for dues? I never understood the structure, but I understood the intent. When I was older I used to go hangout at the Houston Galleria and watch the other kids hangout with their friends while the plainly obvious pedophile skated on the ice rink on the ground floor. My teachers always told me “When you get to college, you’ll meet people who appreciate you for who you are”. And, as teachers often are, they were right. I got a glimpse of happiness in college, but as often happens after college, we all moved away.
In Chicago, doing standup, I had the most outgoing life I’ve ever had. As someone who grew up with not a lot of friends, it was a wild experience. I had my struggles fitting in, of course, I mean, I’ve met myself, I know I can be a handful. But, it felt nice to be surrounded by people. There were definitely down times, but I had forgotten the long-ago days of total isolation. I had friends.
That was a huge part of the confusion upon moving. I had to reconcile that my perceptions of my relationships to others were not their perceptions. People I had viewed as close friends had viewed me—at best—as an acquaintance. Many of the people I thought were very close friends either abandoned me for myriad reasons, or just slowly stopped responding. One of my best friends within a year stopped talking to me and blocked me on social media because they admitted they had a crush on me and now I’d moved and we could never be together (never mind they have a longterm boyfriend that I set them up with, but now we’ve entered into gossip and drama and I don’t actually intend this to be that).
I always thought—because I have self esteem issues—that the best way to make friends was to subsume myself wholly to their wants and needs. In my time in Chicago, I had paid for people’s cars, rent, food, sex toys. Because I thought we were friends. I thought spending all of my time and energy taking care of others was the best way to get them to value me. But, WILDLY, it apparently did the opposite. If only my therapist had told me that multiple times while I agreed with him but kept doing it because of compulsions. IF ONLY he had definitely said that several times. We’ll never know.
The self help books say you have to protect yourself and value yourself and so if people don’t value you—if they don’t return your messages, if you’re ALWAYS the one to text first, if they won’t make time for you—you should move on. BUT, they also say you need to put yourself out there, keep trying, work the grease on the wheel a bit more. It leaves me sort of confused. Much of the self help books have a damaging way of saying the best way to get healthy is to rely on your support network… but nothing about how to get a support network. It seems like support is like politics, you need to have it to get it.
When I moved, I had a friend who I’d talked to online for awhile. We were both moving to LA, barely knew enough people, and had similar interests. We’d met through Twitter, which I truly don’t believe even though I literally know it happened. We’d met up once before I’d moved and we’d planned to hangout and be “new in town buddies”. Upon my arrival, he went from needing to cancel plans because of work, to too busy to make plans, to no longer responding to me. I did the thing where I offered plans for awhile, then did check-ins every few weeks, every few months, and eventually got the hint. I still don’t know what happened and I still don’t know if I should have stopped sooner or kept trying “better".
On top of a lot of the big… shifts… in my life, I’ve recently learned of some potential mental health *spins the euphemism wheel* hiccups which may have contributed to a lifelong inability to understand other people outside of an anthropological study of them. It’s made some of my habits a little clearer to me—like my obsessive worry about other people liking me, which leads to a navel-gazing essay about friendship—and, I’m at least hopeful that this knowledge (as knowledge often does) will help me better understand my interactions with potential friends moving forward.
I spend a lot of time unhealthily thinking about how sparse the attendance of my funeral would be if I were to die today (OCD’s a wild ride, y’all) and how many of the people who attended my going away party in Chicago wouldn’t even know I’d died at all. I know it’s not a good thought—it’s not helpful, it doesn’t change anything, and it provides nothing other than regret and fear. But, that is one of the many rocks I push up the mountain these days. Over time, the rock gets ground down by the pushing and becomes smaller and smaller with effort and time. But, like my therapist often said: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (my therapist was not Albert Camus, he was just quoting him, I promise, I would have told y’all if my therapist was somehow Albert Camus).
I’m still struggling, but I’m working on it. At the end of the day, I guess that’s all I can ask of myself—to try. This year has been a lot of rebuilding, tearing down, rebuilding, repeat, repeat, repeat. And it’s not over. I will cocoon and emerge many times over in this great FernGully of life and the patience for that—for myself and others—is what is necessary. It’s been two years, one month, and… dammit… *scrolls up and back* four days since I moved here, but I’m still new. Still striving, still seeking, still finding, and HOPEFULLY never yielding (politely) in this new social ecosystem that is Los Angeles (also known as LA for short).
