This was actually written on November 11. Since edited for grace and clarity.
Every time at the beginning of household events I tell myself that I will outlast the feelings of unease. Every time a few hours later I find myself poised at the top of the stairs, torn between returning to my room or plunging for the umpteenth time back into the party.
I am probably doomed because I pay too much attention to the ways in which we gather. People seem to congregate with the same intuition responsible for dancing, and I don't possess this whatsoever. I wind up on the sides, stepping back when I should instinctively step forward.
Sometimes being here feels like a futile exercise, a masochistic impulse to force myself through events I know I won't enjoy. I'm a subscriber to the theory that happiness should come from within, and only when I'm content alone can I read into unhappiness with others.
But the goal of a solid sense of self feels empty when I am alone. I can try to cultivate happiness from within but I can't share it with anyone. When I forgot evenings, they would disappear.
A few weeks ago I did a depression evaluation and felt attacked by the number of questions that implicated other people. Do I feel like I have meaningful connections with others? Do I feel loved?
I am lonely, and this is selfish, given that I am surrounded by people ready to comfort me, entertain me, have me in their lives. They are reaching out arms and I refuse, preferring to thrash in deep waters, so that there is no risk of an arm rescinded when I grab for it or no risk of pulling someone over with me.
I want to practice happiness with others. It becomes more of a chore when I am naturally unhappy. It becomes more of a chore when I find myself naturally unlikeable, and am bewildered by the discrepancy in how I feel about myself and how others react to me.
When I stand and watch I catch other people in awkward in-betweens, too. People aren't perfect at the roundabout of parties. People are dropped. I want to catch them, ask them if they're okay, but I imagine that the question would confuse them, because of course they are, and it is the nature of parties to be dropped and forgotten for a moment and then to fly to another group, another moment, in a dizzy sequence of faces you will forget. They dust themselves off and re-join.
Often parties feel like a fight. We try to manoeuvre our bodies so that we're not squeezed out of a circle. We want to leave to the most interesting conversation so that we can hold the most precious collection of stories afterward. I resent my instinct to process a positive event with war-like metaphors.
It's like I experience everything as a battle, where I must lie, lest I give myself away, and that I reveal this deep dark secret of unhappiness that would cause everyone else to recoil.
I can't remember a party at my current apartment that I haven't cried at. Part of it is the overwhelming sensory-experience of it all, but it's not noise I think of in these moments, it's my inability to meaningfully connect with other people.
I used to think that with enough observation, I could derive the pattern that other people use for these events. I thought that if I looked hard enough I would find the source of joy. In hindsight, this analysis probably does more harm than good. I can't be an observer and a participant at once. And the status of observer is safe, safer than immersing myself, and so rote I don't know if I could stop.
Just like I don't understand how everyone else enjoys social gatherings, I don't understand my own panicked response to them. I am disappointed in myself.