Beyond Selidor

Hm! This is a good question.

I am...not very good at friends. I want to be! But I'm not. My problem is that I'm a natural loner and when the choice comes to inertia vs action (i.e. go out and meet new people) the choice is invariably inertia. I'm better at online friendships than real life ones, because I can maintain them from the comfort of my computer. But I'm not the sort of person who says "oh let's go out do X", either I do X by myself or it's simply not something I will do (have a beer in a bar by myself, go to a club by myself, etc.; go on vacation by myself or to the cinema or a play? sure, anytime!).

I've become, as an adult only, relatively okay at what you call context specific friends. I had a lot of trouble with friendships when I was in school (I'm an only child and didn't grow up in a neighbourhood full of kids so I always acted older than I was), but it was pretty okay in university. But those sort of went away when we finished. Moving to a new place for grad school was hard, but I was lucky that I fell in with a group of people who basically forced me to go out (that's when I really experienced what university student life was like, but with some disposable income!).

I stay in touch with some of them, and consider two of them real friends, but most of that also withered away.

I think part of my very specific problem is that I go through phases of depression/dysthymia when I simply Can't. (I'm not clinically diagnosed for Reasons, but I'm have good reason to believe it's the case.) I remain very functional at my job, but I simply Can't socially (also because I interact with tons of people at my job, it ises up all my social mojo). I've had a few lengthy stints of unemployment in the past ten years and as you may imagine that doesn't help, it throws you into so much uncertainty and it's not what I want to talk about then either. But then the communication goes dormant and then simply stops. The same thing is often true for friends-originally-from-fandom, while also here people may go away with context disappearing or life happening, coming back is a bit easier. Though I've taken a long leave of absence from fandom for reasons related to grad school and unemployment as well, when I wasn't even good company for myself let alone other people.

Actually now that I say that, I've actively tried to cut friends out of my life because of that way of thinking (not being good company for them) and it took me until just a year or two ago to figure out that some of those people might know that and still choose to be my friend because they can protect themselves and don't need me to do that for them. (Well, and then there are friends I'm very conflicted about, I think I told you about that 'wedding snub' from a few years ago and it sort of soured me on the whole group. But they also now simply lead different lives, married and with kids, I want to talk about other things than husbands and kids.)

I've had one friend at grad tell me point blank "you never say anything about yourself!" which...hurt but isn't wrong. However, part of that is because I don't always want to talk about work and at that point in my life, work and the shitshow that was going on with my supervisor were the only things going on aside from a low key fannishness. And I don't bring fandom, and the fic I write and my ideas on canon et al, into most areas of my real life if it's clear the people I interact with aren't fannish themselves. I'm chronically single (very much by choice), so I don't have my own woes about my partner or sex life to contribute so........ Idk.

But the bottom line is, I'm pretty okay by myself. Sure, there are times when I would wish there were more people in my life who I could talk to and who were physically closer and would just give me a damn hug, but it's not often or dire enough that I actually...do it. Besides, I'll be moving away (would have already, had the pandemic not interfered) so that whole process needs to start again one way or other and we'll see if that leads to a fresher start with more motivation. And now that I've found my way back to active fandom engagement, matters also are different. I do prefer the online community anyhow.

Also, making friends as an adult is *hard* when you're an introvert who doesn't like to go places.