Hear no emo, see no emo, say no emo

[substitute]

You know that feeling you get when you’ve been with a group of people for a while, and they’re your friends and you see them all the time, and you share things, and you think of them as peers, and then one day you realize that they’re all the group and you’re not one of them?

I get that a lot, probably because my social circle has almost no one like me. And because my daily routine, and the things I like to do, are out of sync for who I’m supposed to be.

I’m forty years old and I have a professional technical career. The people I see around here that are my age are married, have maybe a kid in high school, own property, and are appropriately in the middle period of their lives. Their careers are in full swing and they’re busy with child-raising, working on their houses, working on their marriages.

I live with my mother in the house I grew up in. (To be fair, I lived on my own for years and years, but.) I am unmarried, and I’ve not been on a date for years; I’ve never had a girlfriend. I don’t own anything more than my car. I wear a t-shirt and jeans. I hang out at a coffee house almost every night with people 15 years younger than I. I feel like one of them. I’m interested in the same things, my life pattern is similar, I enjoy their company. But I’m periodically reminded that I’m not one of them. And they move past me. They get engaged and married, buy houses, have kids, move on.

I got stuck at about age 18 and never went past it. It’s nightmarish, like a corny Twilight Zone episode. I was reminded of t this again tonight, predictably, at Trader Joes watching the twentysomething couples buying their groceries together and looking clean and pretty and hip and well-organized and couply. They’re as smart as I am, just as interesting, just as sophisticated and cultured as I like to think I am, and they’re miles ahead of me and only a little over half my age.

And as much as I fool myself from day to day about my social scene, I’m not one of them. Twenty years ago I was with my peers and I was in a place where I belonged. That all moved along and I’m still here.

I can’t stand it. I hate pathetic people like that. Like me, I mean. Like me.

Comments

invcel

[orgyporgy.livejournal.com]

I don't get that, as I spend almost all my time alone, or with my one friend. Well, I have a few other friends, but not in the local vicinity. But I can relate to being 40 and never having had a girlfriend. I'm 45, and same situation. I've never been married either, haven't been on a date in years. Well, I met a woman for tea a couple weeks ago, I guess one could call that a "date". But that was the first time in years. The thing that got me from your post was a sense of being haunted by life passing you by. I know that feeling too. But what is it, really, except a fleeting, mechanical movie that periodically flits through the mind? I try to find WHO that is, the "haunted one," and can only conclude it is not me. I am not that. I am so much bigger than that. It is wise to recognize you are not your story. To HAVE a story, but not identify with it overmuch.

But I can relate to getting stuck at about age 18. For me, I was stuck due to sexual orientation, because I was/am a cross-dresser, and that made me feel ashamed when it came to meeting girls, and fearful that they wouldn't want anything to do with someone with all these kinky desires. For a long time I thought that explained my lack of a girlfriend. But as I grew older, I learned that many cross-dressers have girlfriends and wives.

Well, you've already gotten some good advice here. I think you sell yourself short when you say these twenty-somethings are miles ahead of you. I'm sure you've learned a lot in your years that they don't know. I sure know a hell of a lot more than I did at 25. "Sophistication" is mostly just an act, anyway.

Therapy is a good idea, if you can afford it. I did quite a bit of that, and it can be helpful. Then too, it can sometimes get to be just a pleasant diversion, enriching another's bank account while you develop Understanding and nothing really changes.

At some point I just stopped feeling guilty about it, the absent girlfriend. I can't say exactly how it happened but it wasn't therapy, I don't think. Maybe undertaking a meditation practice helped. But it was simply a determination to really have compassion for myself; that, and realizing my non-uniqueness, de-personalizing the issue. There are many, many people who are similarly afflicted with never having had a girlfriend/boyfriend. Some of them end up having great, fulfilling lives anyway -- think of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Goya, Beethoven, Henry James, Kant, the list is long. There is also a forum on this phenomenon, which someone has coined a term for: "Invcel," for "involuntary celibacy." You might do a Google search for it.

I struggled with chronic dysthymia for many years, with periodic bouts of deeper depression. But now I'm simply trying to get a job in teaching college. I haven't given up on Finding Someone, although I am not at the moment actively looking.

By the way, I don't even have a profession! At least you can say you have a career. I've been more or less a lifelong student. I clean homes for a living but am in the process of switching over to substitute teaching, while I look for a better teaching job. I'm getting too old for this cleaning work. My plan is to sub teach, and either find another college teaching job by next spring or enter a Ph.D. program then, where I can get the kind of teaching experience I need to springboard into tenure-track position. Well, gotta run now. Keep your chin up, man.