The Little Room

Looks like I forgot to do this last week, which is a good indicator of my mental state. It’s not good. Let’s focus on the positives, though.

Yesterday I performed in my first-ever choir concert with the Crash Course Chorus. We practiced five songs for five weeks, and yesterday we sang them to a packed house. It was amazing.

Many of the people in the choir are trained singers or have sung in choirs before, but not me. That didn’t matter though. Yesterday we all sang together and made beautiful music. I’ve been missing experiences like this for quite some time, and it was genuinely a gift to have one again. I will definitely be signing up for the next crash course in the spring.

In therapy, I’ve been learning about attachment styles, shadow work, and Jungian complexes. I’ve been pairing that with Buddhist teachings on becoming comfortable with uncertainty. I’ve been working at the micro level on how I approach relationships, learning not to respond to every anxious thought. Not every thought is an emergency that requires action. At the macro level, I’ve been trying to understand where my anxiety and complexes come from. For the first time in three months of therapy, we talked about my family and childhood.

I’ve developed some slogans to help me on my journey:

• Participate don’t produce
• I can want more without pursuing more
• Slow down without closing down

Things I enjoyed this week

• I saw the movie “Wicker” on Sunday and was very pleasantly surprised. It’s more than a dumb sex comedy.
• This version of Ber’s “Good Like it Should Be” recorded live at Bull’s Horn, a neighborhood pub near me.

This retro is a hard one to write. Last week was tough. I learned some hard truths that I’m still processing.

I start each one of these posts by copying the previous entry, renaming the file, and deleting the content. Reading what I wrote last week and knowing what came after was not pleasant. I feel like Icarus: my wax wings have melted and I’m in freefall.

I’m not sure how specific I want to be because there are other people involved, but basically I learned that my attempts to grow a relationship beyond its current bounds were starting to feel like pressure to the other person, which is the thing I feared doing the most. I was trying to speedrun a new friendship, trying to get to the “good part” I suppose, but I was doing that on my own. I wasn’t including them in this grand scheme of mine, which was my biggest mistake.

It’s worked for me in the past, but that was a very specific set of circumstances. Years ago, before I left Louisiana where I’d grown up, I worked with a guy, and we clicked rather quickly. After I told him that we were moving away in less than a year, we both decided that we were going to maximize the friendship, accelerate it. And we did. It was an incredible nine to ten months. The difference is we both agreed to do that.

In the case of this new friend, I was trying to do all the accelerating on my own, without considering whether we were moving at the same pace. Totally fair. And honestly, we don’t need to speed run this friendship. I feel like I need to because of this journey I’m on to make my life bigger. I also know by doing that I’m missing out on the friendship that’s actually happening while I try to rocket us someplace else. Foolish. I see that now. I saw it then too, if I’m honest with myself.

It boils down to—I think—my inability to sit with discomfort. I’m not prepared to write about that fully today, but when that discomfort sets in—and it has many forms—every fiber of my being wants to stop it. I revisit past conversations, I imagine future ones. I reach out needlessly for contact like it’s a drug, a fix. And if you’re the focus of all of that, I can imagine how much pressure you’d feel. It’s too much for me to bear, and I put it on someone else. Someone I care about.

I was devastated the day I learned this. I thought I had fucked up and lost another friend, to paraphrase that happy, naive me from last week. I don’t think I have. I’m learning to sit with that discomfort instead of acting on it. Or at least trying to.

So, I’ve developed a mantra of sorts: “Slow down without pulling away.” I’ve got it saved in Apple Notes, along with a few others, to look at when the discomfort settles in. And boy does it. I’m doing the work though.

Things I enjoyed this week

• I discovered the teachings of Pema Chodron this week. She is an American Buddhist teacher, author, and nun who has written a lot about becoming comfortable with uncertainty. Sometimes the algorithm gives you exactly what you need.
• We’ve been watching the latest season of “Slow Horses”, and it’s as good as ever.

This week was another big one for me, emotionally speaking.

I’ve been thinking that I’m bad at making friends, but I’ve realized I’m actually bad at keeping them. Or at least I’m capable of making friends when there’s some sort of infrastructure there to keep bringing us together, like work or school. When that infrastructure goes away, though, I tend to lose the friendships. I understand I’m not solely to blame there—it takes two to tango, as the saying goes—but I can clearly see a pattern where I’ve let people I really like slip away.

It feels to me that there’s a secret door that some people are able to walk through, but I can’t. Maybe it’s due to my own brand of neurodivergence, but I feel like there are signals I’m either not reading or misreading. Then, before I even realize it’s happening, I’m left standing alone in an empty room again.

So, this week, I told a new friend a version of that. Kind of just blurted it out in some kind of fugue state—I still can’t recall exactly what I said—but it was something along those lines. I also said that while I figure it out, instead of just guessing I’m going to be explicit. I told them I like them, I’ve liked spending time with them at work and through work-related activities, but I’d really like to spend time together outside of that structure. I told them I didn’t want to fuck it up and lose another friend.

I wanted to die right there of embarrassment, but they took it well. They were very practical. They said “Just ask me to do something with you, and I’ll put it on my calendar.” Simple as that. Kind of amazing actually.

Of course, now I have all of the anxiety that comes with asking someone to do something with you and them saying no, but that’s another problem to solve.

Things I enjoyed this week

• Watching Angel Reese and the rest of the Atlanta Dream defeat The New York Liberty in the WNBA semi-finals.
• I finally got around to watching “Disclosure Day”, and I quite enjoyed it. It felt like Spielberg doing Spielberg things and it mostly worked.

I started the week with the first Crash Course Chorus rehearsal. As usual, I was nervous before I got there, but the nerves went away almost immediately after showing up. That lack of information can be a killer. I realized pretty early that I was out of my depth as far as singing ability is concerned—it seems like many of the others are trained singers and many also have choir experience. I may not sing exactly on key, or know how to read sheet music, but I won’t let that stop me.

Double vaxxed.

Unfortunately, I had to miss the second rehearsal because we traveled home to Louisiana at the end of the week. We got back last night. I balked a bit at writing “traveled home” there, because it doesn’t feel like home anymore. There was a time when we would go back and I’d feel wistful or nostalgic about the landscape and the towns, but not anymore. I feel out of place there, and not just geographically.

I can’t fully be myself there. I’m performing. Wearing a costume that looks like who my family thinks I am or should be. There’s a bit of the real me in there, and when pushed, I’ll reveal it, but for the most part I stay hidden. That just doesn’t feel good.

It’s not all bad. I love spending time with my nephews. One of them even said I’m the number one uncle, but that’s mostly because I know about video games and can write code.

So now it’s Tuesday. I’m home, but not back at work yet. I like to have a buffer day between a trip and returning to the real world.

Things I enjoyed this week

• Slow Pulp’s new album “Melodie” has been on ultra-heavy rotation.

This week was packed—for my standards anyway.

On Wednesday I spent the day outdoors traipsing through a prairie collecting hyssop seeds. I was there with a group of volunteers from work, including a co-worker and friend of mine. It was a perfect early fall day, blue skies, sunny, and cool but not cold.

On Friday I had another work outing: I was given a ticket to a suite for the Minnesota Wild hockey game. I’m not the biggest hockey fan. I only said yes because I’m trying to say yes to more things. It was fun, even as a non-fan. Live sports are energizing.

These experiences come with their own challenge though: they fade quickly and start to seem scarce or finite. I begin to imagine they will be the last time I have an experience like that. It’s worse when I experience them with a person I care for or about. This was a big topic in therapy this week. It’s adjacent to me going into the future or predicting the ceiling on the types of experiences or friendships or even life I’ll be able to have.

It’s a lot to manage, and it’s mostly about staying in the present. Working with the information I have, not predicting. I am at least getting better at recognizing when I do it, and I can recognize that the predictions I’m making aren’t facts. That doesn’t mean they hurt any less, and I think that’s where the work is. Letting it hurt, but not as much.

This afternoon I have my first chorus rehearsal, and then afterwards we’re going to see “Waiting for Godot” at the Guthrie with a friend.

Things I enjoyed this week

• The trailer for Nathan Fielder’s “You Can See Everything” came out this week. The more I see the more, the more intrigued I am with this movie.
• A new Blondshell album came out on Friday. Here’s the video of the first single, “Violins”.
• We had the viral morning buns from Bangkok Sweetheart, a new pop-up bakery that’s been getting raved about on local social media. They lived up to the hype.