Solvable on paper

Two years ago I posted on Facebook about how much I still missed livejournal, even all these years later. Not long after my time on LJ I joined another online community with a bulletin board type format and a culture of long form posting and personal reflection. Between the two I spent nearly twenty years regularly writing and interacting with others. I left that community in 2020. The things that would need to change for me to go back haven’t changed, but, still, I miss it.

It wasn’t until I was no longer a part of an online community that I recognized how much of my social need was being filled by those virtual connections. Looking back I recognize that even in college, by far the most social period of my life, I found my cravings for connection and vulnerability more easily fulfilled from behind a screen than in person. 

I started this blog shortly after that bit of reflection made me realize that I needed a space to write for an audience, even if that audience is tiny and mostly theoretical. Substack’s stats at least confirm that I am not writing entirely into a void.

This will be my tenth post in two years. Clearly having the space to write and actually engaging in the activity of writing are completely different things. I am out of the habit. I have trouble making the time to write. I journal on paper regularly, in what moments I have in the morning before work. That’s a beneficial practice in its own right, but it is different from writing something I intend for someone else to read. It takes a different set of mental muscles.

For so much of my life writer was my primary identity. I was never a writer with an intent to publish or reach an audience bigger than small double digits. What I meant by writer was that I wrote, I felt a need to write. Even when I wasn’t writing, I was thinking in the format of poems, essays, posts and responses. My brain formed sentences as if I intended to put them on paper/screen rather than speak them.

There is a gulf now between that sense of my self and my reality. I do not identify as a writer anymore. I think my brain does not work the same way it did before fibromyalgia. Words hide. Meaning slips away from the tip of my tongue. I still write but the experience is different. It reminds me a bit of my experiences trying to swim. As a child I spent entire summers in my grandparents’ pool but I never learned proper strokes. Now, returning to the water, I find that I have forgotten how to move my body there and I do not have the strength I need. I can keep myself above water, but I cannot really swim. I can put words together into sentences but it still doesn’t feel like writing used to.

The trick to being a writer is to write. Perhaps I want it enough to do it. We shall see.

It won’t solve the other problem, though. The social needs that were being filled by writing in conversation with others will still not be filled. I have written here before about social isolation. I am comfortable with solitude–crave it and cannot function well without it, even–but only to a point. I am past that point and have been past it for far too long.

On paper this is a solvable problem. I know it is solvable on paper because I have done it. I have repeatedly written out the steps needed. Yet here I am, just as isolated as I was.

Some of the barriers to socializing are physical and difficult to solve. With my son in school the likelihood that at least one member of our household is sniffling, coughing, or sick in some other way is high. I spent most of October with a hacking cough and as a result bailed out of work-related social interactions that I was equal parts dreading and looking forward to. Between trying to get caught up with household chores and garden tasks when I am well, and trying to avoid the disappointment of canceled plans, I find myself reluctant to commit to things or try to initiate plans.

Beyond that are the psychological barriers. I am reluctant to initiate plans for fear of disappointment but also the terror of rejection swamps all the urges I feel to ask to make plans in the first place. I could write pages on that alone, but I won’t because I do not have the space in my day for that kind of rawness. 

I am also difficult to plan with. I am Covid cautious still in a way that many people are not, which makes meeting for a drink or dinner require a place with space and outside air. My days flow around working and parenting and it is hard to carve out chunks of time for going places without the family (and planning for going places with the family requires winning the lottery of three of us sufficiently healthy all at once). I don’t thrive in crowded spaces and do not mingle well. I am more likely to enjoy a small get together or something one on one. My exhaustion precludes late night adventures unless, perhaps, someone else is driving. Plus I need somewhere to sit. 

The reality is that probably what I need is people who are game for semi-regular phone calls. Something I don’t have to get dressed or brush my hair for. Something I don’t have to schedule around traffic. Something that can fit in that precious and too short space between my child’s bedtime and mine.

On paper the solution would be to reach out to a few people and ask for that. 

On paper it’s a solvable problem.