The Antisocial Blues

I've been thinking lately about my curious behavior. Sometimes, I astound even myself, and wonder how it is I can be so old and still occasionally feel like I have no idea what subconscious motives are making me operate.

In this case, it's the Antisocial Blues as I call them.

Now, when I moved here to nowhere Oklahoma, I was working 100+ hrs/wk doing programming and related project management. I never left the house except to get fast food (almost my only food) or go to the bank (where the tellers very clearly considered me a drug dealer, given their behavior, because of the large sums of checks/cash I dealt with then. As if I wouldn't have been skinnier had drugs been an issue, haha). Even office supplies were delivered. As a result, I very seldom encountered other people.

I did meet parents of other kids on occasion, first at daycare and then at school as my kid got older, and at soccor. I always rather hoped to find someone I could bond to, someone who could be a friend, especially as my working hours relaxed slightly, and I got rather tired of having nobody to talk to but a small child and too many cats. But I have so little in common with what seems to be most all the people in my region, that aside from human biology, we share so little we could be aliens to each other.

I thought perhaps I could hang out at a metaphysical bookstore; see if there were classes on anything; maybe offer one on remote viewing if people were interested. But we don't have a metaphysical bookstore. In fact, until not too long ago, we didn't even have a bookstore. And the one we have now is very tiny, it's like the retail version of a koan; one of those things you have to fall into by accident and can never find on purpose.

There is no open mike night; there is no mike period. We have no nightclubs. We have no coffee houses. Hell, we have nothing open after 9:00 PM except Super Wal-Mart and McDonald's.

I met a city full of people who had local family. All these people grew up together. Not only do they have all kinds of family members and cousins and so on, and a whole church of people, but when you grow up in the same small city your whole life, hell by the time you're 30 let alone 40 you know so many people that everything must feel like an old-home-day. Me, I went to 12 different schools and often lived places for years where I didn't even know my neighbor's names, back home in California. And I don't go to church. So the first problem is that the people didn't know me and more importantly, didn't need me. They had plenty of people in their life already.

The second problem is a seeming major lack of shared philosophy and interests. Now I don't mean to say that a person has to be into remote viewing or archetypes or homeschooling or whatever, to be interesting to me. I've really liked some people I've met in life that had nearly nothing in common with me; sometimes that difference is itself intriguing. It's more a fundamental nature of personality kind of thing. This is difficult to articulate. But there is a certain depth or dimension to people that you can 'feel', like sonar sort of. Sometimes I meet a person, even via internet, and I feel as if "I could sing into them and it would echo the shape of them back at me and I would recognize it as a harmony to my own." That sounds ridiculously poetic but the feeling is very abstract so it's the best I can do. Well, I just... I just never got that here.

I think that culturally we all have different labels and opinions on things. It is hard for me not to assign the term "shallow and immature" to what I am surrounded by here, but I know that is an unfair bias on my part. It is neither of those things to be focused on your family and your church. It's simply that... well... it's that work all day, feed the kids and read the paper and watch TV till you sleep, church on sunday, living in mundania kind of thing that makes me want to put a bullet in my head. I just don't understand how people can live that way.

Don't they care about the deeper things in life? Philosophy? The nature of reality? The endless quest for self-betterment? I've had a lot of conversations with people. I've tried to casually touch on topics of interest to see who might share something with me, looking for potentials. People just... don't want to think very hard. An astounding number of people are on depression drugs, or other combined medications that make them seem ever so slightly numb. They care about what the news is talking about. They talk about sitcom tabloid actors as if they are personal friends. But mention anything that requires a brain and they react like, "whoa, that's heavy" or something. (And not in a good way.) They'll watch slasher movies, or just mind-bendingly stupid stuff, and eat it up, but they can't even consider talking about something slightly outside the box of their safe little predictable reality. They don't want to improve themselves; far as they are concerned, they graduated high school, in a few cases college, they're done, haha!

I'm an alien here.

So you would think, after 8 years in the outback of NE Oklahoma, that I would be just a tad more social and charming.

I remember about 5 years ago. I was in the city library. I met a woman by coincidence who saw the books in my hand and overheard me say something to my kid and it turned out she was utterly fascinated to find someone else into psychic stuff and science fiction and she was so positive and happy and really wanted to get my number or whatever. At that moment, I was so profoundly burned out from work and sleep deprivation, I was so exhausted, that I couldn't even smile. I'm sure to her I was weird and nearly hostile. Later after I'd slept and felt better, I wanted to kick myself. One other human in my city with shared interests and I couldn't even be nice?! For godssakes.

I sometimes get emails from people, or other forms of contact, where people reach out to me, as if they want to know me better. (I used to have such quantities of that, when I did a ton of online RV stuff, that I actually learned to ignore it en-masse, simply because the numbers made it impossible.) Despite my limited time, I really want to be closer to a few people. I feel a real need for true, deep friendships as I get older. I've got tons of 'acquaintances' I might casually call friends. I have several real 'friends' I love deeply but for various reasons of space, time or personal cycles, we go in and out of contact. I have a few friends who really want more of me now and yet for some mysterious reasons I am rather antisocial.

And I can't figure out why I am so resistant. Why do I not follow up on or seek out the people who know from my writing they share a lot with me, and seek me out? Why do I not spend more time even on the quality friends I already have? Aside from my boyfriend, I barely talk to anybody at all, and only in cycles.

I said about Remote Viewing, I am a Universal Translator. Why is it I'm so willing to talk to targets, so moved by the perception of merge or rapport with anything from inanimate objects to past events to weather phenomenon to dead people to other planets, yet I'm barely willing to develop any serious relationship with other humans--when on the other hand, I am so missing human contact?

I want a woman friend who I can have coffee with and talk to while cleaning house if necessary, who I can dish about anything to and who shares enough of my philosophy and worldview that 99% of my mental life is not foreign or weird to her. I haven't had many women friends in my life, being allegedly more masculine in outlook and getting along well with men, but I appreciate woman a lot more as I get older. I think I'm just flat out lonely. Except I have existing friends -- but all online of course since I live in the middle of nowhere -- and there is nothing wrong with them, I admire and respect them and miss them a lot when I'm not talking to them which is the norm. I mean literally there are days when I feel lonely; when I wish I had someone who really "meant something to me" to share with; and people who DO mean something to me write me, and people new in the public write me, and I don't respond to any of them. I just continue feeling lonely while I continue ignoring all the people, both friends and strangers, who seem to offer a solution.

That's just weird. I'm antisocial. But why? What kind of sense does it make to stand there ignoring friends and would-be friends, all while feeling lonely?

I can only conclude that on some level I must be choosing to create this reality of "aloneness".

Obviously it's coming from me. It's my psyche, my psiche, on some level. I push people away and I stand off and I ignore potential friends and I never get around to talking to existing friends. And then I wonder why I feel alone. It's a miracle I have any friends left at all given my response patterns!

Maybe I am searching for something that is not just conversation. Some kind of rapport that is more than that, but I don't know what labels to put on it. I've lost track of how many awesome people I've met the last 10 years, even the last few, who I've written with a lot for a week, a month, and then after awhile just didn't write anymore and they eventually gave up on me. It makes me frustrated with myself. If I didn't care it wouldn't matter, right? But I do care. So why am I doing that?

I'd like to do an archetype meditation on this, but I'm not sure what archetype(s) would best deal with this kind of thing. I could ask IG to pick something of course, but for whatever reason I often feel better when I can put some kind of label on it.

As a last note, I once met a woman who reminds me of this. She was a french woman living in Santa Barbara, and I went to see her several times. I can't even remember how we were introduced. She was very different than me, but I liked her. In the course of getting to know her, she told me that she had this problem: she desperately wanted friends, she was so very lonely, and yet somehow, she just couldn't seem to get and keep any. But she couldn't place anything she was doing or saying that was causing this. I still feel a bit guilty about her, because as she was telling me this, I nearly told her--and I should have, I wish I would have--that I could FEEL this overpowering sense of "being pushed away" from her. Like on some psychic level she wanted her space and solitude, and she pushed so hard for it that it caused me to feel like I really didn't want to be around her, almost a defensive reaction. But it was definitely at a subconscious level; on the surface there was nothing there at all that I could put my finger on. It was clear to me--and to her too--that on some level, she was creating that reality for herself. Yet she was so lonely, that it was really a tragedy. Gosh, I haven't thought of that woman in years. I can't even remember her name. But I guess now I'm in a vaguely similar position.