Friendships, Loneliness, And Tired of Chasing after people.
I write when an idea comes to me. In recent months, the concept that a friend is not someone you got to chase after was brought to my attention.
I am in a bad situation. I have a choice between being 100% lonely or only 97% lonely.
I don't know what to do about things. If you read some of my past writings you probably know how my life went step by step into the situation I find myself in. Yet it is hard for me describe it all.
For the past 22 years, I have had only one place to have friends. That is unfortunately work. To make things even worse I'm a 2nd shift janitor for a school, and the only people I got to choose from are teachers. The teachers have their own in group. And most of these people got lives outside of work too. Contrast that to me, and I got no life outside of work.
There is restrictions put on me, making it dangerous for me to be friendly with the teachers. My boss does not want me talking too much to them. In fact even He avoids the teachers as much as possible. There is like a culture difference between the Janitors and Teachers. There is even a culture difference between the teachers and the cafeteria workers. As a general rule the teachers and the cafeteria workers don't socialize. As a general rule, the teachers and janitors don't socialize. These people don't understand each other, and they don't feel the desire to understand each other. Plus everyone is busy doing their jobs, so everyone has got that as an excuse too.
Any teacher "friend" I have ever had, was because the teacher decided to say "hi" to me, and sometimes If i get extra lucky, they will ask me how I am doing. If I'm extra extra extra lucky one will thank me for picking up their trash.
What usually happens with these "friendships" is, I feel that I need to try to keep it balanced some, by being friendly back. Sometimes a little talking will happen. Eventually the teacher will grow tired of me and slowly the teacher will stop saying hi etc, and the "friendship" gradually dies.
I have been through this cycle so many times I've lost track.
The way I used to cope with this, is I would come home from work, turn on my computer, and try and find someone online to talk to me. But i would often lose contact with people online. I have since learned there is a term for that. It is called ghosting.
Since I am a Christian the ideal thing to do is go to Church and make friends there. However if you have read my post about Church Hurt, you would know that I am no longer attending Church. You see here in recent years, that is the number one problem with me going to Church. I could only "attend" church. In other words, I could get up early, which is not easy for a person that works 2:00pm - 10:30pm on the week days, and drive to a building, find a seat and go through the worship motions, watch a sermon, and then leave. That is exactly how my parents and I did Church since 2001. Nobody there actually cared. Even when we tried to reach out to them, they didn't care. And it was that way Church after Church after Church. I began to look out in the congregations for people that I might recognize. Sure enough, I saw teachers and staff members from the school system I work for. I'm like no wonder. We got a culture here, that doesn't accept my culture.
@tryingtosurvive2024 Thank you for opening up about what you’re going through. It sounds like you’ve been carrying a heavy load for a long time, and I can only imagine how exhausting it must feel to be caught in such an isolating situation. You’ve done so much to try to connect with others, and it’s clear that friendship is really important to you.
@Mya000 Thank you for your very very very kind response. 7Cups has proven to be the kindest mental health site I have ever been apart of! I keep trying because the pain in my heart keeps me motivated to keep trying. But sometimes I wish I wasn't human, and had no emotion. Then I wouldn't need to feel like I need to keep trying. In the Christian realm, many will say things like "Jesus is all you need." I understand the biblical idea of this, and yet it is also biblical that we as humans are designed for love. Love each other, and love God.
@tryingtosurvive2024
I'm saddened to hear about your struggle with loneliness. I get what you're feeling, I've left my home/city at 18, left my country at 25, and then changed three countries until today; I'm 42 and, until very recently, my only opportunities to make friendships were I work. I could never make true friends with anyone because of culture and class difference and one thing I noticed was that the older I get, the harder it is to make friends. Most other people already have their own friend groups, families etc. and getting the feeling that someone else truly cares about you is difficult - no one calls to ask or just to talk and share time together. I received tonnes of advice from well intended people on how to be less lonely (go out, meet new people, go on dating sites) - frankly, I think such advice does more harm than good when it comes from people that have what you lack: people to talk to.
But I have been lucky, in a way. I sat with my loneliness and try to understand why nature gave us this feeling; nature does not generally build system that are not necessary. We cannot survive on our own, so we get the feeling of loneliness to seek community and ensure our survival; this made sense when we were living in tribes, but nowadays we largely do not need to seek community to survive.
My findings are that loneliness stems from a lack of validation, the validation that we exist and that we are humans - this is why we can feel very lonely with a group of people, but can also not feel lonely when we are alone. What I noticed is that we have four types of validations: external-positive (friends, family), external-negative (social media), internal-negative (our tormenting negative thoughts) and internal-positive.
I noticed that if I focus my efforts on internal-positive type of validation, loneliness goes away. Don't get me wrong, there wasn't an aha-moment anywhere, it took more than a year and the help of an amazing therapist. To validate yourself in a positive way, do things that bring you joy and that make time fly (state of flow). For me these have been day-dreaming/planning my future, picking up tennis and attending a painting art class - nothing related to my job or work colleagues, but entirely related to what I liked to do as a child. After a while, instead of hoping others will say hi or invite me or talk to me, I am the one turning down invitations and ending conversations because they are just boring! I cannot wait to leave work and go home and do what I like to do, by myself (planning, journaling, painting) or with likeminded people (tennis, painting) and my weekends are now on my terms: I want to lose myself in 6 hours of painting today, making a painting with unicorns for an acquaintance's 4-year old daughter. I'm now planning to start a cooking course: better my cooking skills and receive feedback from other students., maybe make a career shift and open my own restaurant in a few years down the road.
Inside of us there's always a little child; let that little child out and let yourself daydream: what activities did you like to do as a kid? Pick one or two, give them a try; you may not feel good about them, pick a few others afterwards.
I genuinely wish you to find ways to get rid of loneliness; it robs us of joy.
