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"Relationships with other complex, flawed people are beautiful and transformative and fulfilling, but they’re also inherently maddening, infuriating, hurtful, stressful, and yes, triggering. It is ideal, of course, for us to work to understand those conflicts and thereby make them less destructive to ourselves and others, but we can’t make those feelings disappear; nothing real can have contact without friction. If you’ve been encouraged to define a healthy life as a frictionless one, I think it may be inevitable that a life devoid of contact starts to feel like healing.
And here’s the thing about friction: it really does hurt. Isolationists have one very strong argument on their side — when you’re alone, there’s no one there to hurt you, even accidentally. There’s no one there to throw your own flaws into stark relief. There’s no one who you might hurt with bursts of uncontrollable emotion or human carelessness. It’s hard to be hurt, and perhaps even harder to hurt the people you love — why not cut the risk, lock the doors, and live a life of robotic, impersonal, action-oriented optimization?
The answer, of course, is that none of us are any good alone."
–"No Good Alone" by rayne fisher-quann, @internetprincess
Oct 5, 2024
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This year has been long and difficult - one extended sit-in forced to reconcile with myself. Though I wouldn’t change it for nothing, this year of constructive stress, I spent the majority of it stuck in feeling I needed other people to understand me. I have felt as if I were split open and bleeding; they know too much of me, the wrong parts of me, making incorrect assumptions. Or worse, correct ones and I don’t know who I am. I don’t know which parts of me to fix or to rather tolerate a blanket acceptance of all the traits and habits that make me who I am, even the ones I feel make me intolerable.
I have come to a reconciliation on this but maybe only due to the sun returning and flowers blooming. Stumbled upon this video, it’s good if ur curious. I think a lot of people can relate to desperately wanting, clawing for a romantic relationship. More specifically, we look for someone who understands, someone who fills the aloneness. I do not know if such a thing is possible; always, there is space between this person and the next. Even in an embracing intimate seclusion with another, there are gaps and crevasses unreachable, unspeakable, nothing with which to tend to these deep gorges of separation. What to do about this? So much of myself I do not understand.
Apr 24, 2024
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I left all social media for something like five years and only posted on a small insular abandoned app during that time and that was the main way I communicated with people. After feeling repeatedly hurt and misunderstood and wondering why it was so hard to build earnest connections through this medium I decided to leave. I realized that constantly narrativizing my life with no filter gave me no space to process or examine and kept me trapped in deeply baked-in stories in my head.
Anyway I’ve maintained contact with a small handful of my closest friends and it has honestly been somewhat difficult keeping in touch to the same degree as I did before about everyone’s day to day lives.
I think the hardest part is being the odd one out so you’re missing out on the tidbits they share in this one centralized place for the purpose of economy and time and that’s something you kind of just have to accept. There’s a certain level of meticulous detail that may be lost to you and I think interactions become more of a broad big-picture thing; not being so bogged down in the mundanity allows you to engage with more distance and perspective which can lead to greater depth and emotional honesty.
And then it’s funny because the communication you’re engaging in becomes so direct that rather than everything being so uniform and kind of tossed out there, everything has to be very intentional and personal.
You have to choose to reach out, again and again; you also have to choose when to give people space. You have to be very conscious of the balance between giving and taking because everything isn’t just being offered all at once indirectly on both sides—and this balance won’t always be perfect and sometimes you might not handle it in the most perfect way.
I decided at the beginning of the year that intentionality would be my main theme and I’m still working on it. So I don’t really have the answers but engaging with friends off of social media shapes everything in new and interesting ways and those are some thoughts I’ve had as I begin to navigate this…
Feb 24, 2025
From the Atlantic: ”There is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own.”
I don’t know anything about you—how funny is that? I couldn’t even begin to guess what your life looks like. I couldn’t spot you in a crowd. If I were a friend, I’m sure I could give better advice. Perhaps suggest joining a local group I know of, or a class at the gym that always puts me in a good mood. Perhaps introduce you to someone I’ve always thought you’d get along with.
The beautiful thing about the internet is that you can ask this question to the void and the void speaks back. It’s so much easier this way, but so much worse.
Geography, family, shared interests, shared labor. Community used to be inescapable. We still depend on each other for everything, but we do it all at a distance. I’ll chat for an hour with a friend across the country, but I know nothing about the people across the street. It’s a selling point if the grocer can name the farmer who grew your food. I could have been writing this to send to a distant family member, who I want to reconnect with, or an old friend—instead I’m writing to you, a stranger. It’s easier. Our community ties have been broken.
So: what do you, an individual, do? You may find more success if you develop individual friendships tied to a place—several articles about the loneliness epidemic talk about the gym—or a group that meets regularly. Apparently, the best way to beak down peoples’ walls is just to see them constantly. This is true for new friends and for deepening relationships. For those friends and acquaintances you’d like to be closer to, keep inviting them to shit. Set your boundaries, but keep trying. The thing about people is that everybody is interesting and confusing and stupid and wise and mean and wonderful—but it’s safer to spill all that on the internet, where no one can spot you in a crowd. Let people know that you’re around and interested no matter what, and see what happens. It will take a long time, but it’ll be worth it. Not just for you, but for them. For everyone, if we all put the effort in.
I’m sorry—it shouldn’t be this way. But we have to try. We’re all counting on each other <3
Apr 23, 2024
Top Recs from @aubergine
From Haymarket Books: "Now as ever, we recognize the root cause and ongoing perpetrator of violence in Palestine to be Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid, and we stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for freedom."
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Project Gutenberg is a a "community effort to digitize cultural works". It has over 70,000 eBooks, including Moby Dick. This is your sign to finally read Moby Dick!
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The vanilla will impart a gentle but intoxicating flavor and aroma to your sugar.
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