Aslaug's Axe Shed

Being slightly bonkers is alright. I’m of the firm conviction that being completely sane makes a person boring and unimaginative. But there’s a difference between being slightly cooky in a fun and interesting way and being seriously mentally ill. I’ve tried both in my lifetime, and I by far prefer the first. Being off the deep end can make you unable to distinguish reality from that which is only imagined, and it can disable your social life almost completely. It’s not recommendable.

So here is what worries me.

Lately, I’ve been having strange thoughts again. Thoughts I haven’t entertained for a LONG time. And what’s worse, it’s debilitating in a way which makes one largely unable to fix it.

So here’s the gist of it:

I have a social life, as most people do. To me, this is a treasure, as I have literally tried having NO social life at all. What that feels like exactly is rather hard to describe, because true loneliness by definition is something one can’t put words to. After all, there’s no one to speak to about it.

But my social circle, while not exactly enormous, is well defined these days. I have friends in several age-categories and spanning everything from highly educated academicians to blue-collar working-man types. I have hobbies, and not simply ones I do by myself, like writing, but social activities like roleplaying or, more recently, a “dinner-club” if you could call it that. A group of four people, of whom I’m one, taking turns inviting the others home for a nice dinner. It’s hard a bit of a rough going in the start-up phase, but it’s getting there by now.

So here’s the problem: I am starting to wonder if people wouldn’t rather be rid of me. Not … everyone. There are people out there I still feel pretty confident actually enjoy my company and like to hang out around me. But the number is dwindling. It’s not that I openly ask myself “wouldn’t this or that person prefer if I wasn’t here”, so much as a nagging feeling that just won’t go away. With some people, it increases practically every time I meet them.

And that’s the problem. These are people I KNOW … logically … would tell me to bugger off if they didn’t want me there, but I still can’t shake the feeling. In at least two cases, we’re talking about people who would almost certainly take it the wrong way if I asked them if it was the case or not. They would either believe I was trying to make myself “interesting” by pretending to backslide, or they would be so annoyed that I apparently WAS backsliding that they would THEN tell me to sod off.

I’m not going to mention names, but suffice to say those two are not the only ones I have this feeling around. It makes me want to go home after work, close the door and shut out the world. But at the same time, I don’t want to shut out the world. I don’t want to be lonely again. And so these two conflicting issues are giving me a very hard time lately. Because spending time with my friends makes me nervous and probably a bit too high strung, but being alone is just flat out horrible.

I’ve only recently started to realize how serious a problem this is becomming, and so far, I think it goes back four months or so, to just after New Year.

I’m not really sure how to cope with this. I’m not willing to panic, nor to sit in a corner with my head in my hands, crying my eyes out. Neither will do me any good. But I’m just not sure HOW best to deal with this.

Maybe spending more time with the people where I don’t end up wondering if they really want me there or not, and less with those where I do is the answer.

I am not sure, and if that is the answer, then how do I go about accomplishing that without offending anyone?

Lots to think about …

What really irritates me is that this is something that I used to suffer from very severely indeed, and that it has returned like this is just another piece of evidence that I’m probably never going to be truly -well-.