Today I opened up my reddit feed mindlessly at lunch. The first post that I saw was from the subreddit for my old Alma Mater: This was the post in question:

Before university everyone told me that I’d have to go out of my way to make friends and talk to people and first semester I did just that but it seemed that nobody was interested in engaging in conversation at all. Every person in every course I spoke to and tried to make conversation with responded in short, curt sentences and never asked me anything back, and the few people I managed to get the Instagram of never messaged first and always responded to my DMs the exact same way. Same exact thing winter semester (and how do you even make friends in these huge lecture halls)? I want to be outgoing but I can also tell when people aren’t trying to engage in conversation and don’t want to be a creep. I’m just so hurt and tired, it’s hard doing everything by myself and seeing people talk to each other in class. I can’t remember the last time I got to just talk to somebody about my day or casually chat about anything because I go to every class alone, attempt conversation with someone and fail, and rinse and repeat every day. I know people said to join clubs but I’m honestly struggling with the workload as is and barely have time to myself, let alone participate in a club. Anyways, I don’t know if I’m just really bad at socializing or if there’s something else wrong with me but it sucks. People try to give me advice but it really just sucks. I don’t even think I’m looking for advice, I just wonder if others feel the same because everyone else seems to know what they’re doing.

The post resonated with me, because it mirrored my experience in school. I had and do have a lot of time socializing. I don’t really like doing it unless I have to, but simulteniously I feel like I am missing out on some major aspect of my life. I didn’t really meet anyone new in University. I was told at the time that the best way to meet new people was to attent clubs and groups. I did try this, but I was never really able to find a group of people that I clicked with. I always felt this sort of liminal acceptance where I wasn’t being asked to leave, but I also was never going to be “one of the guys”.

After I gave up with the groups and clubs aspect of uni life. I tried my hand at greek life. I tried joining DKE. I went to the first party, I met the pledge leader, who’s name I don’t recall and he explained what they did. There’s a bit of a mysticism about greek life that I fully believed at that point. I attended a few parties and hung out at the house a few times. At the last party I attended, myself and two other pledges were sitting outside, the “pledge leader” came down and started talking to us. He asked us a few questions, and then started to explain how their “selection” process works. I said something along the lines of “sure, I’d love to join” which was rejected with a flat “no, that’s not really how this works”. The rest of the night I kind of drifted around the house. I didn’t really know anyone, and everyone else was paired up with a sorority girl. I watched some beer pong in the basement and then just kind of wandered out. Again that liminal feeling was there. I wasn’t being outright rejected, and I’m sure if I had really persisted I could have become a DKE, but the performative aspect of achieving that was just something that I was not interested in.

Following that, I stopped reaching out to the DKE guys, and that was the last I heard of them. The only guy I heard from is someone that I promised my staff discount of everclear to, and even then, I just told him to tell the cashier that I said he could use my discount, and that was the last I ever heard of him.

I felt pretty dejected at that point. I remember thinking back to the advice that I’ve gotten a lot of times:

If you smell shit everywhere, check your shoes

I wanted to find what was wrong with me. I started reading some self help books. Tony Robbins, some others, a few sales books for good measure. I essentially came to the conclusion that if social acceptance was what I was looking for, performing an outgoing, charismatic character was what I needed to do. For the next while, I tried on the mask of an extrovert. I thought of some people in my life that were effortlessly social, and I tried to emulate what I thought they’d say, and how they’d say it. The surprising thing to this is that it did indeed work. People were more interested in talking to me, but the cost of having to put that mask on was just too much. It felt heavy trying to wake up in the morning and pretend to be a person, while also living your real life, with work and school. The real breaking point for me was one night shift at the liquor store, I was working with a co-worker who was a bit younger than me. I was sitting on the chair and waiting for the night to end, and he had left his phone on the desk. I saw a bunch of message previews, all of which asking for him to come over, hang out, or asking for his opinion on something. This guy was one of those effortlessly social types, and it showed. The realization that hit me at this point was that it really was easier for some people. It seemed like his social life was something that lived up in the clouds, and all he needed to do was reach up and pull down what he needed at any given moment. Mine, conversely, felt more like juggling, trying to keep everything floating above my head. Call it bitter, but that realization made me withdraw from most of the rest of my Uni experience. I gave up trying on the extrovert mask, and as a response that reinforced my belief, all of the ‘friends’ I had made during my period of feined extrovert-ness evaporated. None of them reached out, I just never heard from them again.

The rest of my time at university I spent treating it like a job I disliked. Went in, did my work, and left. I didn’t treat it as anything else, because quite frankly, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Later on I met my wife, got a real job, married and had children, which has fulfilled me in many ways, but none of those things really fill the hole of a peer friendship, which seems unattainable. The notion of liminal acceptance seems to pervade my experience. The corporate world itself is the definition of liminal acceptance. Being ‘real’ with coworkers is a really really stupid idea. With the complete lack of labour laws in Alberta, coupled with overzealous, american style HR running the show, oversharing at work is probably one of the easiest ways to lose your job, so it sticks you in this group of people that you have to tolerate, and vice versa, but the true feelings won’t ever be expressed out of kindness or simply desire to keep paying rent. It’s clear that due to my experiment with acting extroverted that the problem really is how I present myself, but the mental impact of changing who I am in order to find acceptance is far worse than the lack of friendship. Plus, the relationships that come from doing this are shallow. It’s clear to me that people as a whole are pretty selfish and transactional. Finding someone that will reciprocate is rare, finding someone that will give freely is even more rare. Still, I think keeping an open door to allow people in is important, because becoming some miserable misanthrope is really not something that I want to do. That said, since I’ve withdrawn, I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I’ve had someone actually be interested in coming in.

You know what, reading this all back, the misanthrope that I was fearing I’d become is really already here, I suppose.