Jan
8
Lord knows I have made some embarrassing confessions on my blog over the years but this might just be the hardest to write about: I don’t have friends.
Well. I don’t have zero friends. I have people I could call or text if I needed to. I have online friends and there is ongoing banter and conversation there. My years-long relationship with my trainer feels like a longstanding friendship, even though technically I pay her to spend time with me.
But a squad? No: I’ve never had a group of friends. I’m not part of group chats. I don’t even know multiple people on an acquaintance basis, much less a “ride or die crew” kind of situation.
In fact, I don’t have a ride or die. I don’t have a bestie. I don’t have a lunch date pal, a walking buddy, an adventurous travel-loving BFF, a comrade in the menopause wars.
Social anxiety is certainly the main reason I have trouble making friends, but this also seems to be a life stage that just isn’t conducive to meeting people. The boys are older now and I’m not ensconced in after-school sports with fellow parents. I work remotely and have for years, my coworkers are great but they exist in the context of Slack messages and Zoom feeds; no one’s going out for happy hour. My volunteering is on hold because of Covid regulations, and with Instacart I don’t even leave the house all that often.
I never did have a lively, thriving social life, but all I can say these days is that my funeral will be depressingly sparse. Minimalist, you might say. Sort of like my side of the wedding party was.
Like I said, this is embarrassing as fuck to talk about, but I recently stumbled onto a Reddit thread that indicates I’m not alone: 1 in 10 Americans don’t have close friends.
So maybe one of you will read this and think, hey, I’m not broken and weird because I don’t have friends like every single other human being on the planet seems to. Other people feel this way too.
Here’s something I find hopeful: both my mom and aunt have made all kinds of wonderful, rewarding friendships throughout their senior years. If I’m half as lucky, there are still plenty of people I have yet to meet and relationships I have yet to experience.
Of course, that probably necessitates being a willing participant in the outside world and not just hissing and retreating under couches at the idea of talking to someone’s actual irl face. At any rate: goals!
Jan
4
Months ago I was talking to a conservative person about some cold symptoms and when I asked if they had tested for Covid-19 they were like: no, and I’m not going to, because I don’t care.
I could write eighty million blog posts on how saddened and angered I was and continue to be about the psychology of “la la la la NOT TESTING” but my forever bafflement has to do with the lack of curiosity. I mean, even if you’ve spent the last few years screeching out your righteous indignation about having to briefly wear a diaper for your big crying baby face, are you truly not even a tiny bit interested in what the test stick says?
I guess it’s much easier to pretend that whether or not you have Covid doesn’t matter to you or anyone else, because ______. (The virus isn’t real, or it isn’t as serious as science says, or it’s all a giant conspiracy, or whatever it is these people believe.)
Whatever. I can’t make sense of the mentality because 1) I never voted for Trump, and 2) I myself am endlessly curious about my meat sack’s inner workings and if I could get a full-body MRI scan every single day I absolutely would.
I don’t think I’m paranoid or even remotely close to being a hypochondriac: I just want to know All the Things. Why has my lower left back area bothered me for years and now it seems like I can feel the same pain radiating from my left hip? What’s going on with my right elbow when I try and do a pushup, is there a reason it always feels briefly “locked” before working? Why do my knees SOUND like that, for chrissakes?
Where am I in the perimenopause process? How’s my bone density doing? Is my liver riddled with holes because of all the Advil I take? Do I have too much visceral fat surrounding my organs? Is my lost IUD okay just space-trashing its way around my withered uterus? Can we get a peek inside an artery to add some context to the worrying news that I have high cholesterol? How’s my bicuspid aortic valve doing, is it functioning perfectly fine as it’s presumably been all my life, or is my heart warranty finally running out?
If there was an easy OTC test for “you have a regular boring old cold,” I would take it. Why not? Then I would KNOW. Who doesn’t want to know? WHY WOULDN’T YOU WANT TO KNOW.
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