Week Four

something that took me a long time to learn: no one hates you as much as you hate you.

I’m going to be heading out of town for the next few days, but check this shit out: an actual seven day week away from the last post! So that must mean that I’m getting the hang of these, or something, I don’t know. Look at us, who would’ve thought. I don’t have a ton of housekeeping to do up top like I have in the past weeks, I think I’m actually getting the hang of this instead of just sitting down and pounding these out in an hour’s worth of stream of consciousness rambling. Which I assume is good?

If you would prefer just word vomit, please let me know and we can correspond over email or something where I promise I will definitely write more than you were asking for. Either way, here goes nothing: its a little more personal than the last couple of weeks worth of topics, but it’s important. I think.

Week Four

I have come to learn an important truth this year. Did you know that your friends will just fucking answer the phone if you call them? I know, wild right?. Especially because every single time my phone rings my first instinct is that my vehicle is twelve years old, so it is not a surpise to me that it would be out of warranty and if throw my phone out of the nearest open window maybe it will stop ringing forever. Which is really sad because I have a great ringtone and I do enjoy hearing it whenever my phone does go off; it’s the opening theme to Succession. But as a generation, it does certainly feel like we have gone further and further away from the phone call. Even though it was never something we (or at least, I) used for catching up with our friends, it was more utilitarian in its function; just calling someone’s home landline to make plans or see if they were home if it was too far to go knock on their front door and that was pretty much it. We were especially primed and ready for the advent of threaded text messages by our years of AOL Instant Messenger, which I’m pretty sure was where any true conversation between the ages of 14 and 22 took place. Having full conversations over a day or two’s worth of texting does feel pretty normal to me… even though I defintely wish there was such a thing as an away message for my texts and I could just get back to them later. Alas, I have digressed.

Ever since the end of my second year of college, I have lived away from nearly anyone I have come to call my friend. For the most part, with some exceptions here and there, everyone I could talk to has been a plane ride or a multi hour car ride away from me. The daily minutae of interacting with those close to me up close and in person was replaced wholly by texting, which lends itself to more pleasantries than it does to a deep heart-to-heart. Over time I developed less healthy coping mechanisms that I have deployed with varying levels of success, but nothing really compares to just being able to level with someone that actually knows you. When I was on my own it was rough, but maybe I would just ignore my mental health because it was just me and I could just play video games or something instead of confronting how I feel. But over the last decade I have not been alone, so when I have gone through my darker times no one has really known except for my wife and that became incredibly unfair to her over the years as we moved from one radical locale to another with only each other and about forty bankers boxes filled with books.

But when things got to their worst points this past year, I just kind of started calling people. Its easier to look back on it with more humor now, but I guess in a more gallow’s sensibility my thought process was more of thinking that things are so bad that what’s the worst that can happen? They ask me to stop calling? I would mask my reasonings obviously, and just play it off as one of my ‘it’s Ryan being a pain in the ass’ things that I was making 2021 the Year of Unannounced Phone Calls. Always keeping conversations at surface level things for the most part. Just checking in on people’s lives, trying to be a better friend to them as I had noticed myself really retreating into my depression in the first part of this year. I would keep my problems and my mental health out of the conversation because I didn’t want to burden them with whatever was going on with me, and I guess it worked because most of the people I’ve talked to on the phone and in my personal life don’t really have any idea how bad things were for me. Unless I’m just terrible at masking. Which maybe I am and I just don’t know that and that’s probably something worth exploring.

Over time I started to have fewer conversations with some people and more conversations with others, and then it kind of really whittled down to just a couple of people, and then I ran out of shit to talk about and stopped calling people altogether. It wasn’t for any other real reason than I couldn’t really grasp what I had put in the header for this post: no one hates you as much as you hate you. They’re not being burdened by the concept of having to talk to you. It took a full summer of spiraling thoughts and ideations to come out the other side when my phone rang this fall and I had a two hour conversation where I actually opened up about what I had been going through to realize this. But they’re not ignoring you because of anything you’ve done to them. In fact, they’re not ignoring you at all. No one is going to stop being there for you if you talk about yourself, you actually do have people in your life that want to be there for you if they just knew what was going on. It’s something that I needed to hear, something that everyone needs to hear, and its worth putting it in bold and large font:

you mean more to the people in your life than you think you do, call them.

Don’t just put it off because you think you’re a burden. Don’t come up with an excuse, even though it’s super duper easy to do it and I have done it more than you can possibly imagine. Just, reach out to someone that matters to you because you definietly matter to them. And this is advice for literally fucking anyone, the people in your life do not hate you. Maybe someone out there hates you, maybe a couple of people, but not all of them because that would be impossible and you are not as bad of a person as you think you are in your own head. This part could get rambly as hell because I have had both sides of this conversation in the margins of dozens of my notebooks over the years, criticizing my own writing or my own ideas or my characters and then on the other side of the coin trying to tell myself that this isn’t as bad as I think it is and I need to pursue the idea and grow it. So i’ll just end it here, relatively abruptly, but at least for me this has been a pretty significant Reason To Stick Around.