blue is the eye
It’s been more than a month since D’s been gone. Honestly, it feels liberating. In the midst of all the hand-wringing and strife, that feeling has crept in slowly, incrementally with each little milestone, but now it feels full-grown, present. Sure, the house still needs a lot of work, but nothing feels missing, in either space or time. Everyone knows what their days and weeks consist of, for the most part, and they continue to click past—albeit mine still go by more slowly than they should, for various reasons.
I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t put so much pressure on myself. I’m trying to do a LOT of things at once, and I occasionally have to fight the instinct to indulge my introversion, especially with regard to being more outwardly-focused in a church context, and just making friends in general. The latter is especially challenging. Not only do I have to overcome my base-level introversion, I also have to use relational muscles that have completely atrophied over the course of 18 years. Before I was married, I only ever had one really close friend, and I’d only ever had 3 of them in my entire life by the time I tied the knot at age 27. Gabe was a childhood friend, and we never really remembered a time when we weren’t close. Timothy was a once-in-a-lifetime godsend when we lived in France, and Aaron and I bonded through playing tennis and Odyssey of the Mind before we became inseparable. And even in Aaron’s case, there were (and still are) large gaps in our friendship, when we didn’t keep up with each other. The upshot of all this is that I don’t have a tried-and-true roadmap towards close friendship with another guy. And I’m 46! Talk about learning as you go… My plan at this point is to attack the problem from multiple fronts: Be open-minded and friendly at church and see who shares interests beyond spiritual things, and also explore hobby-based groups like the local astronomy club. Working remotely like I do, it’s even more important to put myself out there socially, given that I don’t have a group of local work friends to provide a daily baseline of social interaction. Don’t get me wrong—I love my coworkers, but there’s just something about being physically around other adults that I desperately need. Still, it feels like a catch-22, since I need to stay busy, especially with respect to cultivating friendships, to keep my mind from eating itself alive, but I also need restorative time alone—the space in which my thoughts run rampant.
The other mental hurdle to overcome will be the sense of being an outlier, an anomaly in groups. I remember in my parents’ church, there were always 3-4 random older men, probably divorced, that just kind of hung around, and they stood out a bit. They always seemed kind of sad, and like they didn’t really have their life together; remind you of anyone? I feel self-conscious about that, especially in a smaller church, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I am curious to find out whether or not that feeling persists in an interest-based group, so I’ll likely be hyper-aware of group composition and dynamics. We’ll just have to see how it goes. And then, after it’s done, retreat to my comfort zone and recharge.