Apologies that I haven't written for quite some time. I've been studying music therapy this year - hopefully at some point I'll write a post about what some of that has been like.
But that's not this post.
No, this post is talking about loneliness. Again.
I feel like I'm back here fairly often. But then again, it's a common challenge; folks saying that it's a national emergency, all that sort of thing. It kinda makes sense to me, but then, I can't really talk for other people. I can only really talk for myself.
Loneliness seems like a constant companion; the irony of which is not lost on me. I feel it quite deeply at times. Quite acutely in moments like I have right now (at time of writing), when I'm at home alone with not much to do. I can distract myself, sure. But it's only ever distraction.
I think there's a couple of challenges that make this problem more difficult for me. Well, two main ones.
The first is that I have such a need for interaction with people. Like, one-on-one interaction, not just being around people. I need that, like, daily - ideally, for a good stretch of each day. Most of the time, though, that's not the case. I interact with my partner here at home, for sure, but that's a bit of a different dynamic? And it would be nice to connect to other people too. But yeah, basically, that's a need that's not really being met, most days. I'll get moments of good connection, but most of the time not really. I feel disconnected.
The second, unfortunately, is that I'm not good at initiating those connections. I'll think that it will feel weird for the other person if I'm just randomly reaching out, or people will seem too busy (or actually be too busy), or I'll feel like I don't know someone well enough really, or maybe one of a bunch of other things. When I get like this and it's quite bad, I'll sometimes think about putting up a post on Facebook or some such just asking to catch up with folks - but at the same time, I don't want to catch up with everyone. There is quite a long list of people I'd be happy to catch up with, but it's not quite everybody. It's hard to do a group invitation and then have an addendum of "oh, but not these people, sorry". Just feels a bit weird and mean, honestly. A bit of this one probably links back into being autistic, which is fun. But yeah - I've got that need to fill which isn't being filled, and then I'm not good at being able to solve that problem. Which is great, yeah. Really ace.
It's worse when I don't have much to do, which is the case at the moment - I'm in between semesters at uni, so I've got oodles of time and not much to do with it. There's always things I could be doing with it, of course. Working at one of the million projects I've had on the shelf, you know, or doing some songwriting, or doing something crazy and going out for a walk. But most of the time I don't. Partly I think because I don't have much energy to be able to do things - the main way I get energy is from these connections, these interactions. Without that, I tend towards depression and/or disassociation. And when I'm already dealing with some level of burn out - autistic or otherwise - there's not much creative energy there, most of the time.
Part of this probably also links back into romance, or rather, the lack of it. I'd like to have a partner I can be romantic with. My current partner is aromantic - which is completely okay, and we care about each other a bunch, but it's quite different. When there's capacity to be loving multiple people - and there's certainly feelings for multiple people - it's difficult when that's very much not happening. (Partly for above reasons, but also I wrote a song about it.)
Anyway. As usual, I can wax lyrical about the problem, but I don't really have solutions. Maybe I'll start getting better at reaching out to people. Maybe people will start being less busy. Who knows.
