nic fouts

We will never get better at growing up and learning to lie

“Promise that forever we will never get better at growing up and learning to lie”
– Eve 6, Good Lives

People always talk about emotional loneliness or physical loneliness, but I propose that there is a third kind: intellectual loneliness.  To be fair, it’s not something I considered until just this year.  I had always focused on the two normal types because that’s what everybody told me to worry about.  The real problem is that I never cared much about those two kinds.  Far more often than not, I prefer to be physically alone.  It lets me limit the outside distractions on my world so that I can focus on projects or myself.  I feel like that’s a whole other topic to explore sometime, especially on why I prefer non-human interaction above human.  It’s not that I’m particularly bad at or stressed by interacting with other people; I just don’t like it for some reason.

The emotional loneliness metric swings a bit for me.  I often struggle with abandonment issues, but that’s a pretty recent influence on my life.  It started later in college, I suppose.  As close friends moved on to their real lives I was left in the status quo life I had known.  That took a big upturn when I took my job at Epic.  Somewhat contrary to what I said earlier, I’m not great at making new friends.  I’m able to blend in to social situations and make due, but finding someone I can call a friend is difficult for me.  90% of my “friends” only call me when they need something from me.  That’s entirely fine because I like helping people, so I don’t necessarily want that to change.  But that leaves a smaller group that I can go to with my own problems and needs.  When those people unexpectedly leave my life it creates a hole that is often difficult to fill.  I guess I stress somewhat about that eventuality, but I know that there is little I can do to prevent its arrival.  My emotional pendulum swings with my ability to cope with that eventuality: some days I’m awesome, some days I’m less awesome.

Intellectual loneliness.  This is one of those things that ate at me my entire life but I didn’t understand it until I started my job at Epic.  My entire life I was told that I was “different” from the other kids my age.  I never understood what that really meant until I looked back over those years.  During my childhood, I tired to fit in with the other kids so that I wouldn’t be picked on or taunted.  Starting in 3rd grade I purposely lowered my grades so that I wasn’t the kid that “killed the curve”.  Being the top performer in those years wasn’t a thing to aspire to; it was a thing to mock.  Children can be merciless, especially to their peers.  Against the odds, I made it through my formative years relatively unscathed and on into college.  By this point, my habits had stuck and I was successfully in the middle of the pack.  This may have been the first time where I could “connect” with someone else on my real level.  However, I didn’t know these people existed so I didn’t know how to interact with them.  I was still stuck in my habits and I looked normal to them.  Even in the Higher Education sphere, there was still a mockery to be made of the exceptional.  I was quickly given the choice of “fitting in” with my peers or finding my true peers.  Again the majority won and I stayed middle-of-the-pack.  The next several years played out this story until I was offered a job at a place called Epic.  It was this amusement park of a campus that only took “the best of the best”.  I breezed through their entrance exams and landed a job in Technical Services (whatever that meant).  After nearly 5 years in this company, it finally dawned on me who I was surrounded by: the mythical “best of the best”.  These were truly “my peers” and I could start to become my actual normal self around them. No longer did I need to play the fool to fit in, these were truly my fools.

So what makes this a special enough occasion to bring this up?  I’ve been surrounded by these exceptional fools for more than half a decade, but I didn’t see just how lucky I was.  It was really a product of that emotional loneliness that I’ve come to expect.  While attempting to cope with this loneliness, I realized what I was surrounded with.  Nearly four months ago I lost a true friend.  He wasn’t one of those that only called when he needed something.  He was one of the few I could take my problems to and the two of us could sort them out.  Since that time, I’ve spend a lot of time trying to figure out what I was doing with my life.  He had left us so quickly and I wondered if that’s what I should just do as well.  But it was my intellectual peers that kept me grounded in the truth that I knew and the good that I could do.

In the end, I realized what was really keeping me here and that’s what I want to cultivate.  I can find the challenges that give me a purpose and I can rise to them.  Gone are the days where I have to try my hardest to be less than second best and I can really just be myself.  I will weather the problems that come at me because I know I have the strength of true friends behind me.  True friends that understand why I am the way I am today.  True friends that don’t abandon me even when time and space separate us.  I have the best friends in the world, and only they know why.

June 29th, 2014 Posted by Nic | Uncategorized | one comment