Eccentric Flower:200002/Loneliness community and tough love

I began to calm down a little around one-thirty or so in the morning, soon enough to apologize to Patrick and ascertain that he was, in fact, still speaking to me, but not soon enough to prevent him from writing this entry. Well, I deserved the rebuke.

The long email he refers to was a mouth organ item which I had decided not to post there because it would just cause an loud fuss and get a lot of people mad at me. I sent it to Iain and Patrick in hopes that they could pick out the actual meat of the argument I was trying to make, and tell me whether they thought I had a genuine issue or whether I was full of malarkey.

They both didn't say I was full of malarkey, exactly, but they did say I was being tremendously foolish.

The point of the "here's what bothers me about gay people" essay - once all the inflammatory prose (seven-tenths of it) was removed - was that I had expected the gay "community" (in the sense of a group of people with a common cause) to be better, saner, than other such groups I had encountered in the past.

I had expected them to be free of internal politics and squabbles, united gloriously and without feuding in the pursuit of a common goal.

I have since been told what I already suspected: To expect any common-interest group to be free of infighting is to be naive unto the point of stupidity. Iain said flat-out: As soon as there's more than one person in a group with a common interest, there'll be fights, because no two people have the same ideas on how to pursue that common interest.

How disillusioning!

But then I asked myself: Why is it disillusioning? Why on earth should I crave that sort of tedious unity? And I think the answer is that I'm sublimating.

I don't have a group. I never had and I never did. I'm not gay; I don't really feel much empathy with straight men; I'm not female. So gender/orientation groups are right out. I don't support most causes emphatically, I don't have any hobbies I like to gather with other people and talk about, the closest thing I have to a religion is a solitary one, and most group events (like sports, et cetera) are just not interesting to me.

For a while I thought my best hopes were the sex-advocacy community and the transgender community, and indeed I have friends in both. But looking at these communities closely, I get the same old feeling: "That's not for me."

This wouldn't be a problem except that sometime in my late twenties I started to feel the need to be around other people on occasion. This was new and unexpected - by the time I was fifteen I had already gone with the assumption that I would spend my life mostly alone. I still feel that would be for the best (significant other notwithstanding, bless her heart - she puts up with a lot). I am not an easy person to get along with, and often I don't want to be. How dare my brain complicate this with needs I neither wanted nor asked for?

So I find myself in the curious position of sometimes yearning for a community and not really understanding why.

And when I do find a group of people that'll have me, I tend to foul my own stall.

I have a bad habit: The better I know you, the more brutal I'll be. The problem is not that I grow increasingly impatient with you. The problem is that I'm a brutal person. I regard tact and delicacy as something you need with strangers. The less of a stranger you are, the more I can show my mean inner self.

This means a lot of people get hurt when they're not expecting it. Especially since, when they do something that I see as self-inflicted damage - when I think they're steering the wrong way, or doing themselves harm - I have this horrible impulse to tell them so.

Never do this. People don't want the truth. Not even your friends. In most cases they already know it and they don't want to be reminded of it.

Sometimes I manage to retain this lesson. Sometimes I don't, and get in trouble. This week I've done a certain amount of both. I won't tell you about the times I successfully bit my tongue - because calling attention to what I didn't say would be as bad as saying it in the first place.

Instead I'll note that, of my escribitionist friends in particular, there are at least two or three where I resist the impulse every week to write them and verbally slap them around for the ways I think they're wrecking their lives.

Because, as Patrick notes, that doesn't really help them much. It just makes me feel better. It makes me feel less like I sat by in silence and watched a catastrophe occur, but so what?

I would rather have the friends and bite my tongue, I think.

Note that this doesn't apply the other way 'round. In fact, that's one of the problems - my first impulse is to do unto others as harshly as I'd like them to do unto me.

No, really, I mean this sincerely: If you think I'm being a train wreck or a bitch or a moron, you should write me and tell me. It is impossible to offend me by criticizing me - as I've noted before, I accept harsh words a lot more gracefully than pleasant ones. I am not the most self-aware human on the block. I need other people to be the reality check, to say, "Hey, you're out of line here."

Which is probably why I sent the article to Patrick in the first place. And may even be why I keep having these cravings to belong somewhere.

I don't understand my brain.