On Friendship
Wrong!
A few months back my three and a half year old son Declan and I were at the playground and he said that he didn't know anybody there. “That’s okay. We’ll make friends.” I told him and instantly broke my own goddamn heart.
There are few things in the world that I am less qualified to talk about than how to make friends. It is, to be honest, a skill that I do not possess. I’m equally inept when it comes to keeping friends. Let’s just say that the whole “friends” deal has been an Achilles' heel for as long as I can remember.
When I was a child I was terrified of, well, pretty much everything, but particularly other children. I’m not sure I ever quite got over the pain of maternal abandonment. Consciously or unconsciously, I think I internalized the idea that if my own mother didn’t want anything to do with me, then no one else would either.
I was painfully shy and self-conscious as a child and teenager. I started to come out of my shell in college, when I started writing for The A.V Club. I felt like I finally had something to offer the world. I wasn’t just a deeply awkward, painfully self-conscious geek with a history of mental illness and devastating social anxiety. I was now a deeply awkward, painfully self-conscious geek with a history of mental illness and devastating social anxiety with a really cool job. That made all the difference in the world.
My friends were overwhelmingly people I knew from work or the friends of various girlfriends. It was easier that way. I didn’t have to go out into the wild and make friends. I could build upon relationships that I already had.
The problem with those kinds of friendships is that they tend to be conditional. When the relationship with the girlfriend ends, so does the friendship with all the people the now-ex brought into my life. The same is true with jobs, although by the time The A.V Club cancelled My World of Flops and The Dissolve fired me I felt utterly alone in both places. Those painful rejections didn’t end friendships because those friendships died before my time at either The A.V Club and The Dissolve came to a close.
I feel like I’ve gotten worse at making friends as I get older. I’ve retreated further and further inside myself. I love working by myself rather than having to head into a toxic office environment everyday but the freelance life has made living an overwhelmingly solitary existence just a little bit too easy.
If making and keeping friends is a muscle, it’s one that I have let atrophy. That fucking sucks.
Don't get me wrong: I have people in my life I'm proud to consider friends. I value and appreciate these people tremendously but I also low-key always kind of feel like I'm failing them by not being better at friendship and maintaining relationships over time.
I love being a dad. If I feel self-conscious and awkward around other adults, I feel utterly at ease when I’m around Declan. I can live in the moment. I can be myself. I know how to be a dad. I’m good at it. It brings me incredible joy and purpose.
But I worry sometimes that my raging inadequacies as a human being, most notably my extreme difficulty in making and keeping friends, will hamper me as a father. Declan hasn’t stopped soiling himself and he’s already infinitely better at making and keeping friends than I am. It comes naturally to him. It’s not something he agonizes about, that fills him with dread.
This is kind of a depressing and soul-bearing article, so to lighten things up a little here is an image of Missy Elliott and her Yorkie Hoodie
In my darkest, most despairing moments I fear that it is too late for me to learn how to be a good friend, that I’m too old and weird and awkward to develop such an essential skill, that I’ve relegated myself to a life of loneliness outside of a few cherished and indulgent friends, my family and my writing, all of which bring me tremendous joy and meaning. I hope that I’m wrong, for my son’s sake as well as my own.
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