I know that this blog has had a kind of whiplash between wrestling posts and sad posts lately. I feel like I should apologize although I don’t want to. I like joy but I’m not a happy person. Rather than feeling as though I’m inflicting this on you, though, I hope you’ll see yourselves as taking part in an exorcism. I’ve got to get things out and for whatever reason it doesn’t work for me to put them in a diary for no one to read.
Part of it is that I’ve always looked to see myself in advice and posting online and I never did. I didn’t want to hold everything in and then be like why are people in my situation never represented well. I don’t think I have any answers for people like me, but I didn’t want this kind of perspective to be lost forever. If it’s just me, it’s an exhibit. If it’s more than just me, maybe it’ll help you to understand this type of person.
It’s not lost on me that a lot of my problems are self-inflicted. People will say “you don’t have to let other people get to you” and they are right, of course. But the way I’ve always felt about my problems is that they aren’t insurmountable, so the impetus to fix them was not immediate. I had something more important I was trying to chase.
Like I said in a previous blog, what I’ve always wanted was authentic relationships, especially online. But why did I want this? I know that for a lot of people, online isn’t where you go for these types of things. I said previously that I’m a weird guy and it’s hard to see myself in a lot of IRL groups, and that’s true. Also part of it, though, was that I saw other people finding this sort of community online, so I thought it was possible. People were finding relationships online and that’s what I wanted.
More than anything, I wanted validation that I was a likable person. And I realize now that in the times I’ve acted out and pushed people away, a lot of it has to do with the fact that people who I thought would validate that simply didn’t, or rather, they didn’t do it in a way that I appreciated.
Now, that’s not to say that I now realize they were doing so in some secret other ways. I’m not saying that to put people down but more to forestall the kind of romantic comedy denouement idea here. I’m not realizing “wow they were my real friends all along”, but I’m also not not realizing that.
Let me try to make it make sense. In the last blog (I’m not gonna link back to my sad blogs) I mentioned how I attempted to defend someone and was basically told to butt out, or at least that’s how I felt about it. What I wanted in the moment was to feel that my presence in defending someone was appreciated. Not in the abstract. This was someone I knew and who I hoped I was cultivating a friendship with. That’s why it hurt, because I was trying to help someone who I thought liked me, and that person in that moment didn’t show me the appreciation I was looking for.
I’m not saying that they did anything wrong here. They had their own situation which I got.
My problem is that a lot of times, I feel like a man dying of thirst going up to everybody I see, shaking my cup for some water. Everyone else may have perfectly good reasons for not giving me their water, but it’s still going to make me more resentful as I keep going. I’m not resentful at them necessarily (though I may be), I’m mainly resentful that I still don’t have any water. That’s the situation I’m in and always trying to dig myself out of.
I get that I am not the most pleasant person to be around. Like I said, I know I have problems and I know a lot of them are self-inflicted. But that doesn’t seem to stop everybody. Just being unpleasant has seemingly never stopped people from having dating success or getting good jobs or having lots of friends around. There’s a lot of talk about how off-putting people with no friends are, but most of the absolutely heinous behavior I hear about comes from “popular” types, while some of the sweetest people imaginable are effectively recluses.
It’s not that I attempted to be unpleasant on purpose. It’s more that I feel my problems, the ones I’m conscious of, are like little potholes and speed bumps. They’re things that can be smoothed out and repaired. But because I was not ever finding my people, because people don’t really take an interest in me the way they take an interest in others, I felt like there was something else that I wasn’t getting, something bigger.
Sometimes I feel like I put too much emphasis on “metrics”; I’m not doing hardcore analytics but I’ve always been high-strung about courtesy likes and stuff like that. It’s because I don’t understand why it never really goes my way with posting. When I see the posts of people who get shared around a lot, I’m never like wow that’s so much funnier than anything I’ve said, that’s so much more insightful. There’s some jealousy there, sure, but it’s not strictly about numbers, it’s about being validated. I don’t need more and more likes, but it’s frustrating to post a bunch of jokes to zero likes, a bunch of commentary to no attention, when at other times posts of the same “quality” that I make do get attention. It makes me feel like sometimes I’m doing shit wrong and I don’t know why.
Then other people will be like “haha lowbie scum eat my shit” and I know that they’re joking but it just feels like… even if I wanted to try hard and build my followers, it just wouldn’t work.
I know that I’m unpleasant in a lot of ways. But am I unpleasant in a way that I’m not aware of? Am I so intrinsically off-putting that even when I say something clever and insightful, people just have an aversion to engaging with it? That’s what I’m always fighting against in my mind. Then when I go out there and I do my damndest and people still aren’t responding, it reinforces that.
The number of likes and retweets is just a cipher to me, it’s a step in the right direction. But I want quality of interaction and that’s what I never seemed to get. It’s great if someone likes an article I wrote, but I want people to read and react. It’s great if someone retweets my joke, but I’d like someone who wants to talk to me. I never needed more followers as such. What I wanted was for the people I had connected with to like me more. Not even overwhelmingly. I didn’t want to be anybody’s best friend; I would have welcomed it but that’s not what I was craving. I just wanted to be accepted by people and I didn’t get why I wasn’t.
Right now, I’m focusing on trying to recognize these issues that I have and trying to move forward. But here’s the thing, and it’s something that often slips out of my mind because I don’t want to think about it: I’m scared. See, this moment that I’m at where I’m saying okay let’s see if I can work on my temper a bit more, let’s see if I can hold back my comments on certain things, this has always represented for me an admission of the fact that I am just intrinsically unpleasant. Or, more accurately, it’s an admission that it might not get better.
Before, I was trying to find out why my situation was not improving. I thought that I’d figure that out, I’d start getting to where I wanted, and then I would work on these other aspects. It feels kind of like these other things like being calmer in general, not correcting/debating with people, those are the window dressing that makes the house look appealing from the outside, but the inside is still considered ugly. If people started to like me for those reasons, it wouldn’t be real. They were interested in those signifiers and not the things inside that really made me up.
On the other hand, because those things were just signifiers, maybe people just still wouldn’t like me no matter how nice the window dressing was. Maybe the problem really is more fundamental and this is just my lot in life.
So in order to get myself to start focusing on these aspects of my personality, I have to accept that maybe I am just a fundamentally unpleasant person. Not by trying to act unpleasantly, of course. But maybe it’s just the way that I am. I can’t be so scared of that idea that I don’t move anymore. I also can’t do this for anybody else’s benefit; I can’t do this just to get people’s interest, because that’s not the kind of interest I’m looking for.
I want my house to look nice and I want someone to like the inside decor. And if it really is ugly inside, I need someone to come in and tell me that. Maybe that’s a little easier if the window dressing is up to snuff. Maybe it isn’t. But I’m going to start shopping for the window dressing anyway. It’s something different to do.