Carpet Surfing The DMs For Crumbs Of Validation
Lurking My Own Online Domain Like a Goblin With an Avoidant Attachment Style Is a Dog That Just Won’t Hunt
It feels a little like a frantic hunt for the cocaine crumb. You know the one. And if you don’t, you’re about to get an education. The sun’s just come out and the plastic baggie of your second eight-ball is sitting cattywampus on a mirror with a bunch of pink bullshit around the border that looks like foam or bubble gum. You know what it looks like to me? The cover of that Battles album Gloss Drop. The one with the white backdrop and a mountain of pink sludge. The former white girl magnet that was your coke stash is now turned inside out in front of your mouth and empty as your bank account—although it's still covered in a white dust that you intend to mop up with your tongue. You lick it clean, but it doesn't do much. Your mouth is dry but your gums are barely numb. You’re hunched down on your hands and knees in front of the coffee table that you were snorting on all weekend long, and desperately digging through the carpet like you’re in some kind of hyper-focused but delirious state of consciousness. It’s a senseless endeavor because even if you found anything, it wouldn’t even take the edge off your amygdala’s hunger for more drugs. You just have to come down, there’s no other way for this to end up. You know that, but you can’t stop rummaging around like a raccoon in a bag of trash trying to collect the ingredients for a single shitty bump. That’s what it’s like to scroll through my DMs for a hit of connection.
I don’t mean to sound dismissive to the people who take the time to send something heartfelt, because I do read those messages and feel touched by and respond to them. It’s a problem of energy being misdirected. It’s like taking medicine for anxiety when you have depression. It does take the edge off to be reminded that I have positively affected anyone’s life, but it doesn’t negate the fact that I’m avoiding making friends. It’s kind of like how making memes takes the edge off of the constant fear and excitement that revolves around my mounting desire to try performing stand-up. It’s not necessarily a good thing to use one thing to avoid the other. When I have a recurrent emotional impulse that requires me to act in my everyday world and I try to solve it with my phone I always get shitty results. As we’ve discussed, the Big Bad Wolf I’m running away from is the risk and effort it would take to develop an in-person social network. I’m aware that extreme isolation is a physically unhealthy thing to indulge in that can kill you if you fuck around long enough. I just feel stuck. Ol' Paul Mccartney was belting it out on Eleanor Rigby a long ass time ago: All the lonely people, where do they all come from? They come from a network of sick societies that have no choice but to leave the old, poor, and disabled people this discarded and alone because they're hellbent on profit, Paul. Duh.
I hate how much I isolate myself, even though when it comes to how much I choose solitude I’m ostensibly still in love. I’m a long-time listener and never-time caller that’s not waiting on phone line one. I’m avoidance royalty. King of the Kingdom of Not Around Much. Unfortunately for the parts of me that are unwilling to stop judging and simply be mindful of it, this particular maladaptation of mine has a lot of built-up momentum. I’m a former junkie and was an unpopular ADHD kid growing up. It’s basically my main problem at this point—at least as far as the behavioral ones. My inner critic is pacing up and down the hall of my mind griping like, “Oh, go add a broken heart emoji to your spam account bio, princess.” Well, they can shut the fuck up. It’s my turn to talk. Have you ever felt profoundly lonely, and left every message you had unread regardless? I fail to form bonds. I’m not able to bring myself to attempt to save the few I make, so I let relationships slip into the darkness. When I’m outside of my apartment and there are no other people around—say, if I’m walking down a dark alley in the pre-dawn hours and smoking a little something fragrant—it soothes me to recognize it. My primary diet of socializing consists of mostly small talk with people I’ll never see again. At least I hope not. Okay, see, I hear the neurosis in that one. I have it on good authority from Chuck Palahniuk that Tom Spanbauer often said, “Writers write because they weren’t invited to a party.” When I first read that shit, I spit my water.
I’m not in full goblin mode—I do have half a handful of friends in my phone I text from time to time, and 2 poly relationships that probably keep me from jumping off the deep end of hermitage even though sometimes the communication can get sparse. That’s mostly my fault, though. I feel too proud to reach out, even with basic shit. It’s quite a testament to the power of the mind that you can know that something is bullshit with every logical device at your disposal and still fall for it. Perhaps an aversion to sending messages first sounds silly, but I think it just needs context. I can look at it and see that the crack of unwillingness to take social risk in the pink Etsy mirror of my psyche stretches down to all my moments of childhood rejection—and there were quite a lot of them. The amount of times I’ve been excluded from the group before I even grew my first pube can be the pink foam shit. Nevertheless, sometimes I find myself on the brink of being swallowed by some wordless void, and I have no choice but to forfeit. I tap out of wrestling with my inner demons by tapping around my little miracle rectangle to get to Instagram for a tiny wisp of recognition. Validation. Something! I don’t know. Some sort of affirmation that I exist. Then, sometimes I find it in these messages, and part of me wishes I didn’t. The part of me that’s free sees the bliss in it and when they read them, they want to end-of-the-movie sob; the part of me that’s still caught up is looking for something and wants them to do the impossible. To heal the areas of my heart they have no connection to at all. The cowardly part of me doesn’t like them because receiving a beautiful and honest expression from someone’s heart about how much they love your art dispels the illusion that it could ever stand in for finding loved ones you genuinely give a shit about to ride with you in the metaphorical cockpit. They’re hard evidence that the emotional relief I’m scrolling around for is as nonexistent in those DMs as those ghost crumbs of coke are in the carpet.
Luckily, my only goal left in life is to let go in such a way that it allows the free and blissful part of me to grow larger.