09. Feeling Lonely? Get a Reverse Therapist!

It’s 2023 and we’re lonelier than ever. WHY? Help!

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WE ARE IN A FRIEND RECESSION. 💔

Ask anyone. By anyone, I mean Google. Google “friend recession.” Behold the waterfall of articles. According to every major and minor news publication known to man: Now, in the year 2023 people have fewer friends than ever before. Some articles say that men are suffering the most. Other articles claim that no way, José— women are the real victims.

Post-pandemic, women lost more friends than men did (apparently). Men sustained their friendships during quarantine by playing team video games with each other remotely (apparently). TL;DR—Women lost all their friends because they aren’t as into first-person-shootering as their male counterparts (in reality nor virtual-reality, but I digress).

WE NEED TO SELF-LOVE.❤️

Ask anyone. By anyone, I mean Google. Google “self love.” Especially if you want to be inspired and/or (more likely) nauseated. The term “self love” is as exhausted, as overused as the word “influencer.” Or “Trump.” Try not to dry-heave.

Self Love. It pains me to type. Makes me feel like a cliché, by proxy. From my Googlings, it’s unclear what “loving yourself” means. The advice is confused, contradictory. Drink matcha. No, meditate. Go outside. Stay in bed. Wake up early. Work out hard. Don’t work out at all! You deserve a break, girlie. Stop drinking coffee. Just kidding, don’t limit yourself like that. Don’t restrict. Unless it’s the wrong kind of sugar. But also: EAT THAT DONUT, QUEEN!!

The more nuanced version of self-love is: Everything in moderation. But who knows how to do that? Relax, but not too much. Work, but don’t overdo it. Take a bath, but don’t live in there. You’ll prune. And probably get toxic shock syndrome, whatever that is.

If you ask me (which you didn’t, but you’re my captive audience so ha HA!), focusing on self-love during a friend recession sounds like getting really good at masturbating because ain’t no good men out there anymore. Which, I think people might also think is true? There are no more friends and there are no more romantic partners left!

Time to buy that one vibrator that everyone on Instagram owns and never leave your apartment. That’s self-love, baybee!

Party of one, your table is ready.

Sigh.

A party of one doesn’t sound like a very fun party to me.

Sugar-Coated Sadness

What flavor of lonely are you? 🥰

A best friend of mine called me on the phone yesterday, her voice in pieces. She’s been feeling lonely. Profoundly so. I wanted to assure her with a big SAME, without claiming her pain as mine. By “SAME,” I didn’t mean I was experiencing the same sad. I was just trying to reassure her: You’re not alone with your loneliness. I get lonely, too. In my own way.

Loneliness comes in many flavors.

Life is a box o’ lonely, Forrest. Ya never know which flavor you’re gonna get.

Maybe you’re lonely because you want a relationship.

Or you’re lonely because you feel alone in your relationship.

You’re lonely because you’re eating dinner by yourself.

You’re lonely because you’re at a dinner party where you’re not really connecting with anyone.

You’re lonely because you haven’t been invited to something in a while.

You’re lonely because you haven’t been invited to something ever.

You’re lonely because it’s between the hours of 2-5 PM in the afternoon. Satan’s hours. Maybe this one’s just me. I hate mid-daytime. I could die in mid-daytime. That’s when my energy dips. That’s when I feel suddenly, existentially hung out to dry. The 3 PM sun is high in the sky, casting shadows. She mocks me. She fills me with malaise.

Maybe you make yourself lonely, sometimes. For no real reason other than bad habit, sticky negativity, a propensity to spiral.

You wake up in a tangle of body-consciousness and money-stress and too many to-dos and your boyfriend rolls over to hug you and you cast him out to sea. You say “Nobody can help me! I am stress incarnate!” and you shoo him out. You say, “Go live your happy day while I, a goblin, spend the rest of her life dissolving in this very bed!” And then you cry and cry about being alone in bed, oh so lonely, woe is you, how could anybody love you, you are such a wretch.

Maybe this one’s just me. I am annoying, sometimes.

(But learning to love myself regardless.)

(This seems closer to what all that self-love advice should be telling us).

I Don’t Need God, I Need Church

Fine, I don’t need church I need community.

I don’t believe in participating in organized religion because of, ya know… reasons that could fill a standard backyard pool. But I do think that congregating once a week with one’s community to just like, sing songs and feel full of some greater collective energy seems like a pretty swell gig.

Oh, church. I wish there were an alternative for church. An excuse to get together every Sunday. A sense of community that doesn’t feel so… entrepreneurial. So uphill. I want to just show up to Not Church™️ and see my friends and their families and some kids and their grandmas and grandpas so we can all catch up on that week’s nothings.

Alas. The dream evades me. If I want to see all of my friends in one place, I have to put together a Paperless Post invite and send a million text follow ups. BE AT THE RESERVOIR PARK AT 10 BRING A BLANKET OR ELSE XOXO.

Among the “friend recession” articles I found, one in Women’s Health noted the “increase in people moving towns or countries in search of work, leaving them unable to access long-standing friendships with ease, a dicey urban rental market in which people are forced to move frequently and so are hampered from forming rich connections with people locally, and the spiralling cost-of-living often necessitating working for longer hours or taking on side gigs, leaving little time for nourishing friendships.”

We’re Ubering, as a way of life. Jumping from ride to ride. Living forever in the personless smell of a sanitized car.

Therapize Your Therapist!

Sure, love yourself. But remember loving… other people?

Do you take care of yourself first or others first?

There’s no right answer. This isn’t a trap. Which sounds like something someone would say if they were laying down a trap, but I PROMISE. Which, okay is also something someone would say if they were laying a trap—

This week I watched an interview with famous author & fountain of inspiration, Simon Sinek called “The Advice Young People Need to Hear.” When talking about self-help, he says: When you go to a bookstore, there’s an entire section called Self Help and no section called Help Others.

He expounds on this by talking about the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. They say that if you master 11 of the 12 steps, you’ll probably succumb to the disease again, but if you complete the 12th step you’ll probably beat it.

The 12th step is: help another alcoholic.

One of his friends was really going through some shit during the pandemic. She came to him for help because she didn’t know who else to turn to. Initially, he acted as her therapist, listening to her pain, working through it with her. She’d leave feeling better but the better wouldn’t last. So, he decided to try something new. Instead of talking about her problems, they would talk about his. Simon’s. She would talk Simon through his problems and an interesting thing happened— the emotional impact of having helped someone else made her feel better for longer than working through her own problems.

Do we all need to turn the tables on our therapists?? Help ME help YOU to help ME—

There are totally opposing schools of thought: You can’t take care of others til you take care of yourself! You can’t take care of yourself til you know how to take care of others!

Again, it’s not that black and white. Everything in moderation.

As the interview continues, Simon continues by talking about how the economy has shifted — we need each other now more than ever. But we haven’t built that infrastructure yet. This country was built on competition, so however subconsciously, we think we need to be competitive before collaborative with each other. The American Formula is: Get our own first, and then (and only then) can we even think about helping out someone else. That person is always on the rung below. Which means we’re always on a ladder. Never living laterally.

I feel this competitive poison in my blood. My life only ever felt like competition. Since I was 8 and started to take soccer seriously (which, if you know me, ruled my life for over a decade to come), I lived believing the world was something to overcome, not experience. I loved my teammates, but was also trying to be better than them. How lonely is that?

To be fair, not all of what I lived was bad. Competition makes you strive! Aspire! But it also makes you want to fucking die, when that’s all life is about. It’s isolating. So isolating.

There’s only one space on the top of the podium.

Sometimes, a trophy is just an empty cup.

When Do You Give Up on Someone?

There’s a movement called People With Energy That Does Not Serve You Should be Thrown the Fuck Away. I mean, that’s not the official name. It’s just a pattern I’ve seen. The pattern looks like this:

A talking head on a social media account tells you, “Hey Gurlie - if your friend is bugging you with their Debbie Downer attitude, you better throw that bish away before she harshes your starlight vibe. Shine bright and cast off those who can’t keep up!!”

Tf is that about? Can I only be friends with people who are “on” all the time? Pretty sure those people are called influencers and as we already discussed, they’re exhausting.

I think of my another of my best friends, DM. I mention him by name because I know he’s gonna read this and I’m waving at him. Hi, DM. Remember all those times you called me late at night because you were going through some deep shit and I talked you down from what you were feeling as best as I could? Remember how you were impossible to talk down? Remember how we talked through your memories, traumas, frustrations into the wee hours of the morn? And, psh: remember all those times I called YOU with some absolute bullshit I made up in my own dumb head? All those times I’ve called you crying and not really knowing where the deep, dark hurt was coming from? All the times you reassured me with your gravel-y, tired-DM voice, a voice with the texture of a vinyl recording, breathing through my AirPods like a song, not giving up on me, never giving up on me.

Those were some heavy problems we handed each other to throw out, when we were too tired to hold anything ourselves. Problems heavy enough to pull us closer.

Imagine, if instead of taking each other’s calls, we were like 🌸🌸BITCH DON’T KILL MY VIBE!! 🌸🌸

Ahhh hahaha…

Self-loving the people you love out of your life seems… wrong. Have boundaries, but damn.

I can’t imagine being surrounded by only happy people who “up my vibe.” Standing in a room full of permanently-smiling faces sounds like the most apocalyptic kind of loneliness. An epidemic of emptiness.

I’M FINE!!!

(She says behind desperate eyes.)

It’s hard to admit a need for connection, sometimes. Maybe not for you. For me, though. It is. So, if it’s hard for you to admit it, it’s okay I’m here at the back of the class with my hood up, feeling the same. I don’t need anyone. I can handle it on my own. I can always handle it on my own—

But I shouldn’t. Because who am I trying to impress? We already know I’m not friends with our sweet Lord. He’d never be friends with me.

I still don’t know how to deal with the hours between 2-5 PM. Sometimes I just stretch or something. That helps. I feel like my own friend, when I do things like that. When I slow down because I recognize I need that. Is that self-love? Who’s to say.

I don’t have some blanket solution. I’m just a bundle of thoughts this week. This Sunday. Damn, wouldn’t it be nice to hang out at Not Church right now?

The dream.

Love ya,

nat