Do you ever go so long without getting a text or phone call or email that you convince yourself your phone must be broken and your internet down and then you finally get an email and your heart beats faster only to realize it’s spam and that nothing is broken, you’re just really lonely? Why isn’t there a word for that feeling yet?
I just prepared for a phone interview by spooning my dog. It went just as well as any other phone interview I’ve done in the past year. I had to cancel a first date at a coffee shop in order to make time for the interview. Now I have to cancel the rescheduled date for the follow-up interview. I have been trying to get a single date since February and I have been trying to get job interviews for two years. While apologizing to the date I have yet to meet via text, I accidentally called her the wrong name. I was just trying to convince my interviewer that I am really detail oriented, organized and good with people. What a farce.
No smiling
I almost met up with someone else who has a Social Anxiety Disorder! I never really spend time around people that have the same problems I do. In fact, I tend to only come in contact with really talkative people that take hold of conversations and never let a moment sit still in silence. It makes total sense to me that I would have a natural affinity for people that can carry conversations with a brick wall because they happily perform what I consider to be a burden while I play the role of patient listener. But all of this social anxiety has had a pretty huge impact on my life. It would be such a relief to sit with someone who understands how I feel. It might even be fun to pick up some of the slack in the conversation and lead it myself or jointly. It could even be a a conversation about….living with SAD!!
One of the most annoying aspects of talking with people who don’t suffer from SAD is getting some condescending unsolicited advice such as: No, really I have social anxiety too! I have to force myself to start conversations with strangers at parties but I get nervous each time. You can do it too! Yah thanks, therapy, self-help books, prescriptions, be damned, someone finally gets it. A tip to those people: don’t assume you actually have a disorder just because you, like all humans, have anxiety. I’ve also been on dates with self-proclaimed ‘shy introverts’ and yeah, okay, I see how they fall in that category but part of me is so disappointed when the date is a really charming talker who looks totally fucking at ease while I’m struggling to remember my name and how I got to the cupcake shop I’m seated in and praying my sentences are actually full of real words and not just random sounds. This might seem cynical (also overly presumptuous since they could just be well trained in passing) but this has essentially become part of my identity. People that are struggling or in some type of pain I can relate to provide so much relief, it actually makes me happier than being around people seem happy.
So, I have been pleasantly surprised to find someone through a dating site that is very upfront about her SAD and when she asked if I wanted to meet up today, I totally agreed! Then she cancelled last minute, like right before I left. I was like…….yay!!!!!! I’m so happy I don’t have to do this really stressful thing and that I found someone else who doesn’t want to do this just as much as I don’t! I understood so well that I kind of knew this would happen as we were planning. Now I know what it’s like when I do it to friends and it’s not nearly as bad as I would have thought. Well, at least from my point of view. So, I usually enjoy cancelled plans. When people ask me what I’m going to do with two days off in a row I’m like “you know, stuff…that involves alive people that aren’t my dog…or my parents…and definitely I will see sunlight” but honestly I’m plotting to make some plans to do stuff so I can cancel last minute and feel even better about my choice to do nothing. (This could be why I don’t have a huge social circle.) But, truly, today’s cancelled plans were the most fabulous cancelled plans of all because not only was I relieved, I knew I had found someone who gets it and that was a really nice way to start the day. I spent the rest of it in bed feeling hopeless and isolated and a little bit twitchy from the stupid side effects of my medication. But, you know, baby steps.
Do you ever feel so down about yourself and what you are doing in life that it’s too hard to be around people because it feels like they have everything you want? I am so bitter around even the people I love that I can’t stand being around them. I am actually furious around friends because I feel like every topic of conversation about their lives is flaunting something I would kill to have like a career, or a partner or a group of friends who share my interests. They just think I’m too depressed to function normally and probably believe they are doing all they can to help just by inviting me. I feel better alone because I can focus on connecting to other people’s pain by watching or reading something sad. It has gotten to the point where I want intimacy and friendship and something to be proud of so badly that I can’t be around people because I’m being exposed to everyone’s connections. I am a lone wolf but I am sick of being this lonely.
I think I’ll buy the succulents myself today. Didn’t I think I was clever, drawing a comparison between myself and a myth? My life is not a Woolf novel and I’ve never thrown a dinner party. A Sunday without a work shift is rare. A warm day of April in this town is rare. I draw arbitrary lines to classify the severity of my illness. Only an ill person would stay inside today. I tell my mother we’ll buy the succulents on this day. She looks up from her computer screen. She’s revising proposals. She makes money fighting AIDS and bullying. I don’t really make money and it seems people no longer expect me to. No one could have foreseen my desire for succulents. I, too, was surprised that I could be seduced into gardening by listening to co-workers discuss wedding bouquets. I can’t secure a bride, not even a lover, but I don’t want to miss out on flowers too. My mother doesn’t ask questions. We go to the farmer’s market.
I read Mrs. Dalloway ten years ago. The teacher let us vote between Joyce and Woolf. There were only four boys in the class and they groaned when Woolf prevailed. The novel confirmed what I already suspected: moments do not exist in isolation but my experiences of them do. I started failing classes when the towers fell on live television on the fourth day of school that year. Everyone was trying to get into Harvard. I was trying to get high in the woods with Ashley. I missed her presence at school. I still feel her absence in my life; she might have even enjoyed my writing and not just because so much of it is about her. My guidance counselor did not understand why I had been so affected by the attack since I had not personally lost anybody. The kids on those planes though. I shrugged to his question but at night I slept with the lamp on. I started my first round of anti-depressants when my midterm grades arrived.
My coworkers think I’m on the spectrum. They talk to me slowly and assume I don’t understand the most basic of social cues. My stuttering and the monotone cadence of my voice both stem from the social anxiety, not autism. This is a distinction that even my closest friends conflate.
One morning, we are preparing the store for Easter as my coworkers discuss their siblings’ flawed lives. They say thinks like “I don’t want to toot my own horn but I think I came out the best of all my siblings”. They comment on my lack of contribution to the topic but don’t seem to infer the obvious: I am the black sheep they are talking about. Then they reminisce about how they used to get high with a boastful longing for their rebellious younger selves. They make a joke about me and LSD. It’s funny to them because I don’t even drink. It’s funny to me because they don’t know why. They look at me and giggle and I pretend not to have heard. “What was that?” I ask as though I haven’t been able to follow the conversation because I’m too busy stacking stuffed bunnies into baskets. “Nothing!” they holler with a quick smile and return to merchandizing.
I hate myself for not trying harder to resist parallels to cliché literary allusions. Sometimes a trip to buy flowers is just a trip to buy flowers. It doesn’t have to dig up all of your accumulated insecurities. It doesn’t have to trigger this degree of regret. You can browse a greenhouse without heartache. The journey to buy succulents is supposed to carry a simple message: I’m trying to enjoy my survival.
The outdoor selection is spectacular, an entire table full of voluptuous spikes. A father on the opposite side of the table asks his two young children which ones they like most and their mouths start to water. I feel creeping shame as my mom effectively asks me, her 28-year-old daughter, the same question.
I once found a photo album sitting in my grandfather’s basement. In it, there were faded pictures of my adult aunt walking through the woods with her parents. I knew immediately what this meant: Cathy spent her weekends taking walks with her parents. There were no additional albums full of my aunt celebrating major life events. I foresaw this very outing five years ago in that basement. I am reliving her life. Eventually, I will drink every night until my own brother can no longer follow my stream of dialogue on the phone. I cling to the fact I don’t drink.
It would be nice to have a garden of outdoor succulents, but my parents’ house blocks the sunlight from hitting their yard. We enter the greenhouse and locate the indoor plant section. There are two succulents. As I am staring at them and considering which window they’d thrive best in, my mom is making the same expression she wears when served undercooked poultry: a scrunched nose that means ‘yucky’. I know better than to react to this face. If I pretend the plants are exactly what I want, she’ll come to respect them.
We walk through the aisles until my mom loses her voice and can barely breathe. She waits outdoors where she isn’t as allergic to the air. I am admiring some potted plants beside a couple that has been slowly strolling and pointing while holding each other’s hands. I see the woman’s face and swallow the sudden lump in my throat. How glib it was to think I could simply buy flowers without dragging baggage through the greenhouse.
Sophia was a member of the Expos, my elite 8th grade softball team. I don’t remember our track record but I do recall the pleasing way her outfit draped on her lean frame; how she hit home runs but strolled casually around the bases like she was mouthing fuck you to the other team and a little bit to ours too. I admired her boyish nonchalance as she won us the game. She wasn’t all angst though: she clapped for me when I was at bat; she made room for me on the bench even though I didn’t want to sit with the team. She was better at the game than I was but we both rolled our eyes when the pitcher shed tears (which was after every game) or the right fielder struck up conversations with friends on the opposing team as pop-ups dropped around her. My longing to be close to Sophia scared me. I avoided interacting with her entirely.
For a second, I feel a certain contentment that those feelings have been somewhat resolved and she will never have any idea the role she played in them. I’m thankful my face has changed more than hers so we don’t have to strike up an awkward conversation about what we’ve been doing for the last decade and a half. But the feeling melts as I realize the man beside her is likely to be her husband. What if they are planning the garden for the yard of the house they just moved into? A list rapidly generates in my mind of all the things she’s likely to have experienced between our last meeting and now: high school boyfriends, a college major, unpaid entry level internships, breaking up, being broken up with, happy hours, getting her first job that she actually cares about, meeting someone she wants to settle down with, moving in together, promotions, wedding invitations, in-laws.
And then, as though a reflex, I start to generate my own list of more compromised ambitions: the career that never began; the awkward dates that led nowhere; watching Ashley’s mental health unravel; trying to hide from my mom that Ashley had been expelled and institutionalized; getting used to failing high school tests; crying so hard I tried to slap myself out of it; my lingering obsession with the children on those planes; 8 years of unrequited love for a friend; watching Ashley crumble after the trial when the assaulter was declared not guilty; explaining to several gay men why I didn’t want to wear that dress; six hand-penned journals full of pain; the mess of pill containers on my dresser; the paper flowers taking over my childhood living room; the poetry collection I acquired my senior year of college; the customers who correct my pronunciation of ‘aubergine’; my resistance to prescriptivist grammars; the books on gender and prison and race; the customers who scream at me about wedding programs; the daily discussions about my mangers’ wedding bouquets; the wish to be able to hold someone else for one night; the mounting resentment for the gay marriage movement; the bitterness; the inability to forget.
I often wonder how my life would be different if I had held it together in high school, if I had recovered from tragedy as fast as my friends seemed to. All those years of working hard might not have felt like a complete waste. Maybe I would have learned to drink in moderation and not needed to take pills to get me out of bed in the morning. I wonder whether Anna and I would have bonded over Mrs. Dalloway in the giant wooden chair at the park, shortly before she discussed it at her admissions meeting and they gave her the full scholarship. Would I still have felt the pain and would I still have learned to deal with it?
I remember the confusing day I got back a pop quiz in English and I actually passed, not because I gave a damn about my grades, but because I got it: I knew that when we bump into strangers downtown, we become bound by webs that stretch thinner as we get further away from one another but always remain delicately intact; I knew about the feelings you have for a friend that you can’t express, how everyone thinks she’s crazy because she’s willing to strip at the party with hardly any alcohol, and how she has a way of feeling life that others can only witness; I knew that some people struggle harder than most realize until it’s too late, and for people like us, each day entails a choice between an indefinite stretch or an abrupt course down.
My college writing teacher said that some poets refuse to use modern references so as to make their work more timeless, more serious. I reject this notion entirely. My writing needs to be firmly grounded for my exact coordinates, where personal grief intersects collective trauma. My words plot out my coping mechanisms and I need them to be specific, accessible, available. Such mechanisms include: reading each installment of dykes to watch out for when you’re searching for friends; smoking a joint with Ashley in the alley behind the Coolidge Corner Movie Theater before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; tucking your cell phone in a drawer and reciting Caedmon’s hymn aloud when you’ve just sent a message that says I’ve been in love with you for six years, please respond; buying chalk paint at home depot so you can scribble ne’er fear the heat o the sun’ above your bedroom door because you need to be reminded; enjoying rain because everything moves slower, like no one wants to get where they’re going and because nature has a way of achieving equilibrium with my mind’s illness; sticking to beliefs even when they alienate others around you because seven years later you’ll realize that song was sexist and that neo nazi did make you feel ashamed; accidentally standing up for yourself because your mental filters short-circuited under the pull of your heart. I want to remember that my education was not a fast track to financial success, even though that was what it intended to be. But look. Here I am with some coping skills.
Snippets of Not Passing:
I was called a lesbian by a boy in first grade before I knew what lesbian meant. In kindergarten, I overheard two older kids debating about whether I was a boy or a girl. My seventh grade science teacher referred to me as a boy in front of the class for an entire year. He was well meaning but the kids who laughed each time he mis-gendered me were not. Nobody overtly commented on how wrong it seemed for me to be in a dress, but I got the feeling other people could sense my aura of humiliated defeat. Their silence was almost as bad as cackling.
Sleep-away camp was a nightmare. Not just because of the complete lack of rechargeable alone time but because a room of 15-20 preteen girls bond by trying on each other’s dresses, putting on make-up before dances and thoroughly reporting on every interaction they had with a boy that day. Even if I had the energy to fake interest in their world, I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t fit into their non-plus sized dresses and boys were not interested in courting me.
In high school and college I had no sexual experiences. Part of this was because I was still closeted and battling my own internalized homophobia, but a lot of it was because I was so conventionally unattractive that straight guys wouldn’t step within a certain radius of me, even the ones in long term relationships with my closest friends. One of my best friends, who I am still really close to, came out to me at 16 while we were attending a queer film festival he dragged me to. I was hurt when he chose to go to prom with his less close, but feminine, pretty and popular female friend but I understood why he made that decision because I understood the laws that govern high school. My back-up, a recalcitrant gay freshman who I had spent the year giving rides to, also found a prettier, feminine senior girl to take him to the prom. I road to the dance in a limo van (which is really just a van with a driver as we found out that night) with 10 other people, all of whom were paired off. As they danced, I sat in a red sequined dress that had to be returned and altered twice before it was large enough for me to squeeze into for a few hours. The night confirmed what I already knew was true: I would never have regretted it if I just hadn’t gone. (I will trust my kids to make decisions about whether or not prom is good for them.)
Reflection:
Looking back, I see my own strength. I had an innate sense of self. I couldn’t tone down my stone butch persona, even before I was conscious of what it was or meant. I endured the stigma and the isolation and pain brought by being non-gender conforming, something that others had already been interpreted to mean even more. And these experiences shaped many of the great qualities I love about myself today like my ability to empathize, connect with and defend people who’ve endure similar or different problems. However, these childhood scars are something I am still learning to deal with. I resisted accepting my sexuality until I was 19. It felt like everyone else was prematurely placing me in a box against my will. I might have wanted to have sex with women, but I also wanted to be loved and appreciated and desired. The box I was being forced into didn’t seem like it would usher me towards any of the latter things. One night, when I was 17, someone at a gathering said ‘raise your hand if you think [my name]’s a lesbian’. My friends all raised their hands and smiled at me. I couldn’t separate my sexual desires from the resentment I felt for being placed there.
It’s impossible to work out who you might have been had you not had the type of childhood experiences you pray your own child will not be subjected to. I’d still be quiet and shy, introspective and introverted. But maybe I’d be less compassionate, less interested in social issues, less patient with the people that others ignore or avoid. Would I still have all the social anxiety? Could I have avoided years of feeling isolated in various schools, cities and jobs if I had honed some core social skills during adolescence and young adulthood when I was just trying to survive with so much loneliness? Would I feel less antagonistic towards people when I suspect they would have been mean to my former self? When you grow up fat and then lose weight, you can retain your fat political identity even though you are no longer read by others as a fat person. I hear the things ‘nice people’ say about fat people and weight when they think no one in the room is being targeted. This is how I feel whenever an absent person is labelled weird, stupid, or has some quality that the accuser doesn’t know how to classify and therefore has to degrade.
So much bitterness:
I think about these things because I’m 28 and I have never been in a relationship of any kind. I have trouble relating to and opening up to people like acquaintances and co-workers and very often, friends. I don’t want to be so aloof but my experiences in life have been different from most people. I’d rather not reveal all of this baggage because frankly, this isolation is stigmatizing and and fosters the acute loneliness and depression that there’s not much space for discussing unless I’m writing here or talking in therapy. People discuss their upcoming weddings, having petty arguments with partners, weekend activities that involve mini trips or building gardens. I wish I could share stories like these too or provide insightful advice to people’s problems. I wish I could pass as someone who knew about these things or could even hold my own in a conversation about them. The truth is I’d kill just to have the types of problems they are experiencing. I am proud of who I was and who I’ve become but it’s interfering with my ability to be, if not happy, just less lonely.
I have come to terms with these struggles as part of my queer narrative. The shame and social anxiety I learned from school and peers. The repression that ensued. This unbreakable loneliness and the intense social anxiety that is interfering with my potential to have a career, a partner, a family and a lifestyle that involves fighting over bills and who makes dinner. It’s six years out of college and my peers from high school seem to be getting married all at once. The girls I went to camp with are showing off their pregnant bellies on Facebook. I thought they were so immature at 13. I wanted them to stop squealing so loudly in front of the mirror while they talked about how gross body hair on is. But they grew up and moved on and formed lives and probably don’t remember those days as vividly as I do. I am the one still conflicted over whether or not to get lunch each day because there is no one to eat with and the solitude is not a choice but it is routine. These things dig at me a bit but, I’ve also understood it as dealing with a queer childhood and the influences that made my development a much different experience than most people’s. I have resigned myself to this path because I’ve always been the slowest to get going but the most thorough by the finish.
So much bitter:
But here’s where I’m becoming bitter in ways I can’t resolve. Several of the friends I went to high school with, the ones who didn’t really spend much time with me when they were hanging out with their boyfriends, the ones who made ‘harmless’ jests about my masculine demeanor, and the ones I’ve grown closer to after coming out and healed the past wrongs with as I help them between relationships and they listen to me be depressed about the lack of mine, they are now entering relationships with women before I have even had the chance to. I don’t believe in any type of inherent justice on this earth but I can’t help but feel a burning bitterness when I’m around these happy couples. After all those years of being treated differently because I didn’t pass as a typical feminine straight girl, the girls who passed as typical feminine straight girls are enjoying the same sex relationships without the magnitude of scars that I endured for being this way from the start. I want to be happy for them because they are my friends and sexuality is fluid and who knows what types of internalized homophobia they have battled in their lifetime. But I remember being called names like it was yesterday and the way it felt like my school and my friends were complicit in it. I reassured a friend last summer, after her boyfriend broke up with her, that she would find someone else and I knew that was true. In the back of my mind, I also knew she would find someone again before I could even get a first date with anyone. I was right. Even during her breakup, the thought of providing comfort for her overrode the sadness I felt because no one provides that type of comfort to me when I deal with the same issues of rejection and being alone without any of the temporary perks of dating or being in a relationship. I tried to provide the same comfort a few months ago when she broke up with a different guy. But right now, seeing her in the honeymoon phase of a sapphic relationship she just fell into. It’s crushing me. I can’t even be around them because I am so lonely it hurts to see things come so easily to my friends and wonder once again whether I will ever be able to experience that type of feeling. I don’t want to be a bad friend. But I can’t smile through it again. I just want things to be better for me and I can’t work any harder at that than I am. Progress doesn’t just feel slow. It feels non-existent right now.
The basics:
Queer, masculine and socially anxious. This is hopefully one place a shy person with a marginalized sexual and gender identity can sort things out and make a few connections.
And also:
This is a safe space for depression and the anger that feeds and follows it. It is an unsafe space for blindly aggressive optimism, particularly when expressed by stale expressions and white-washed appropriative ideas.
Backstory:
I have been torn for a long time now between publicly writing about my problems to possibly find some relief and the fear that such actions could be classified as unproductive, self-involved wallowing. I don’t know where the line between liberating self-expression and detrimental self-indulgence lands but I have a mounting suspicion that the latter case is often exaggerated to the detriment of the former. I have come to understand my guilt as a byproduct of a culture that thrives on making people feel bad about themselves and stigmatizes those who potentially defy this system.
What I have noticed is that when I point out that something is sexist or racist, people write me off for dwelling on the negative. Those same people freely discuss the need to lose weight, a familiar discussion that presupposes that all woman are perpetually unhappy with their current selves. Not only is this type of conversation not perceived as negative, it actually functions as a bonding experience. My thoughts? Some people are licensed to voice dissatisfaction and self hatred freely, particularly when those feelings benefit the industries that rely on a longing for arbitrary and impossible notions of beauty. Other people have to fight for the space to voice dissatisfaction with those norms and the outcome is often horribly isolating. When the socially sanctioned standards are this disturbing, who am I holding back for?
Write what you know. There are so many struggles I cannot relate to but depression is one of mine. Not everyone has the opportunity to express it, explore it and find a way to live a satisfactory life while embodying it. Why shouldn’t I take advantage of this privilege? Sometimes a moment when I can relate to someone else’s pain is all I need to get through the day, week or month. Perhaps this can provide more of those moments.
Why bulldyker?
Because Stone Butch Blues has one of the only female protagonists that I have ever been able to relate to both because of her masculine identity and because of the social isolation and pain she experienced throughout the book.
Because I’m masculine and female and I want to embody and express those aspects without perpetuating the misogyny, transphobia and genderqueer erasure that are often associated with old school gender roles?
Because the name hadn’t been taken yet and that made me sad.
Bull Dyker 