In my therapy session today, my therapist commented that I was much more animated than usual, and was using a lot of hand gestures to illustrate my points. I guess he was right. I'm usually much more physically reserved.

I talked to him about the difficulty of finding people to connect with. We use the analogy of fish in a pond. I often feel like a koi fish in a pond of goldfish, and I wish I could find other koi fish. There's nothing wrong with goldfish, they're just... not the same as me. And I've been feeling that difference a lot more lately.

My therapist suggested looking for people somewhere besides the internet, and I'm not opposed to that, but I have no idea where to even start. One of the biggest difficulties is that I have no interest in making new friends over shared activities or hobbies. I explained to him that even though environmentalism is a cause important to me, I don't identify as an environmentalist. I don't really identify as many nouns, to be honest. That sounds really dumb and pretentious, but I mean, I just don't feel like any of these things are an integral part of me. They're things I do, not things I am. I write, but I don't call myself "a writer." I collect webcomics, but I don't call myself "a collector."

The problem with this is that people tend to bond over these shared identities. People like to say "oh, you're this thing? I'm this thing too!" I just don't feel that way about the activities I engage in. I'm not attached to them like that.

How do people meet other people? These are the ways I can think of off the top of my head:
-Existing social connections (friends of friends)
-Clubs/activity groups (which tend to be interest-based)
-Nightclubs/lounges
-Parties
-Work
-School
-Internet (Social media, chatrooms, uhh... Craigslist?)
-Going up to strangers and striking up conversation (which is what my client does, but I am not going to do this)

I'm not in school anymore, and my work/volunteering is very solitary, so I can't meet people through those. I don't want to go clubbing to try to meet people, and anyway, I don't think the kind of people I want to meet would be at clubs. My friends don't seem to know people they think would match well with me. And activity/interest-based groups... Ehh... My experiences with that in the past have been largely disappointed. If there was a "meet up and just talk about anything" group, maybe that would work, but then, why not just go on a chatroom?

And you could try to make the argument that I'm just "not trying" these things, except that I have tried all these things. I go to every party I'm invited to if I can, I've gone out clubbing with friends, I've chatted up strangers. So far I've only really had any success with relatively lasting connections that have come from online.

When we talk about grad school, my therapist likes to suggest that I might find my koi fish there, but I'm afraid to hope for anything. Maybe grad school will have people like me, or maybe it will have people who are goldfish.

Probably the worst part of this is that I was perfectly fine with being a koi fish in a goldfish pond until relatively recently. It's like a hunger that's been reawakened. If you're hungry and you just don't eat, the feeling tends to dissipate after awhile, so you don't notice it anymore, but then if you eat something, it suddenly comes back full force. That's what this feels like.

I guess on the plus side, if I never find another koi fish, I'll eventually get used to it and forget what it was ever like to know one, and I won't feel the longing anymore.

---

Went to the gym for an hour tonight. That makes 6.5 hours this week, I think. I'm going to go again tomorrow if I can.

Sounds like you just need a similar temperament. I dated this guy for a while named Andrew...he and I loved hiking, loved reading, loved...a lot of the same things, to be concise, but there was zero chemistry--sometimes it felt like he wasn't even speaking the same language. Hobbies do nothing, but sometimes you do get lucky and find people who laugh at the same stuff and can speak a language you understand, when you just join groups.

Anyway, I get it. That's my frustration--there's no way to join a group for people you'd like to befriend, no way to simplify it down to a formula.
» Unicornasaurus on 2015-12-18 12:20:25

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