‘I so alone. What happened to me?’

Illustration: Pedro Nekoi

Do you have any advice?

I feel so embarrassed because I’m almost 23 and half of the time started online. It’s not that I judge people when I meet them like that. I just crave the teenage romance I never had. I know LGBT couples and singles on the periphery, but none on a close level. Part of this might be my fault for not getting into clubs as a student, I don’t know.

I have two bi friends that I could invite to a gay bar, but we all have different schedules. The thought of reloading dating apps again makes me want to cry. Oof, sorry this is a no-brainer!

I’m just too tired for nothing to last more than a few months. I’m sick of having nothing to do with or involve my closest female friends. I should have found my tribe by now, people with whom I can be comfortable, openly affectionate and loving, pure or otherwise. But I did not.

I have hope for a future life with other gay people. It’s hard to imagine it right now. Help?

Signed,
Sad Sapphic

Oh my, SS. It sounds like you’re in pain.

Your letter went in a few different directions (as our minds often do when hurt). But I want to point out one thing that I noticed first. At first, you associate your situation with a sense of personal failure: You can’t love yourself, and that’s why you’re lonely. That doesn’t work. It’s just self-torture.

When we look at the truth of our lives and when we have too much time on our hands, we tend to create constellations. That is human. But sometimes we are so familiar with the shapes we have created that we forget that we created them in the first place, and they start to look like the old reality.

Not being confident or “not loving yourself enough,” or whatever you may want to say are legitimate concerns, they are not grounds for self-harm, nor should they prevent you from gaining warmth. in life. You are lonely. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.

Continue. Have you seen it yet? Neon Genesis Evangelion, NS? It’s an animated movie. I promise I’ll go somewhere with this, so stay with me.

If you haven’t seen it yet Evangelion, all you really need to know for the sake of this column is that it deals heavily with the topic of loneliness. It illustrates that topic as AT School (absolute terror school), a kind of force field that all living things have that simultaneously protects them and distinguishes them as individuals.

The main point of the program is to overcome AT fields: pierce them to destroy the invading aliens, but also remove them completely so that human loneliness can be overcome once and for all. forever by bringing us back to the primordial soup, a collective consciousness where things like pain and ego can no longer keep us apart.

I like the idea of ​​accepting loneliness as fundamental to the human condition. I think it’s important to take the feeling of personal failure out of the equation and ask us to consider that, well, being human is hard. We are individuals, but we desperately want to connect with each other on a meaningful level. That process was difficult. You can know a lot of people but still not have many genuine relationships.

I’m not in favor of all of us being the soup, although if that was an option, I think it would be fun. I do not know. Why not? I’ll give it a shot. What I to be says that it sometimes helps me to think about the AT domains, all the barriers in place that keep us from truly connecting with others: ego, trauma, anger, pride, etc.

Everybody, everybody have these. It is no surprise that in our contemporary lives, where our schedules rarely coincide and we have so many substitutes for human interaction, we often often meet rather than connect with each other. This is not inherently a bad thing. If we connect with all the people we’ve crossed over, we’ll run out of emotional batteries very quickly.

But I think when we feel isolated, it becomes very easy to be isolated. We are used to familiar routes in our brains: our way to work, our favorite places to get food, #content on our regular schedule. We quietly hoped that something or someone would break the pattern, but nothing happened.

I’m asking you to disrupt, SS. That could be like any number of things. Sign up for an activity you never imagined you would do, ask people out that you were too nervous to reach, be open about wanting to make real connections: These things can is a rock in your stagnant water. They can create something interesting and new.

I hope (very strongly) that I can guarantee that you will make lifelong connections doing this. But I can not. Indeed, you should watch out for the possibility that you will emerge from some of these endeavors empty-handed.

All I can guarantee is that you deserve to feel loved, and there are a lot of people out there who are feeling what you’re feeling, and that’s why I think we need to be brave enough. feel to connect with each other, like we all quietly hope someone will do for us. We must be ready, SS, to lower our shields a little.

Also, please make me sure and don’t over-analyze Evangelion the same. They nailed an alien to a cross on it and glued a woman’s brain to a computer. No guarantees can be made for all of the materials contained therein. A lot of messy things happen. A lot of sick, messy things.

Thank you.

Con mucho love,
Papi

Originally published in January 22, 2020.

This column first appeared in John Paul Brammer’s Hola Papi newsletter that you can subscribe to on Substack. Buy books by JP Brammer Hola Papi: How To Get To The Walmart Parking Lot And Other Life Lessons, here.