You might want to skip this one, Julian. I’m not looking to put you or Felicity in the middle of anything but I just have to get all this off my chest.
I feel like Joe has completely given up on me.
And not just me, us. He never participates in any, and I mean ANY, of the usual ways we used to get together as a group.
No Zoom calls Tuesday and Friday after midnight. No Denny’s on Sunday night. No getting together with Julian and I to watch Colbert at midnight. No nothing.
He’s technically been back home for months now and to my surprise my life has barely changed at all. The only difference is that every now and then, seemingly entirely by accident, I see him for like half a second.
You know, just enough to confirm that he IS around and therefore he definitely IS avoiding me as opposed to when he was sick and living with his family and therefore had a pretty good reason for not being in my life.
Now, all he does is make vague noises about insomnia and being tired to Julian and it’s a magic “get out of all socialization” card and permission for him to just plain not bother with us any more.
And that really, really hurts.
To say it breaks my heart is a vast understatement. It crushes it. I always thought he enjoyed spending time with me and Julian and Felicity but apparently it was an onerous task he was dying to escape this whole time.
And I know what’s happening.
Warning, I’m about to be creepy in that special way of mine.
I know that when it comes time to decide whether or not to participate in one of our activities, he is choosing the immediate warm comfortable relief of saying no and enjoying the euphoric rush that we introverts apparently get when we dodge socializing.
Hence people talking about feeling positively giddy when plans fall through.
Not me. As patient readers know, I don’t take disappointment well, and Joe has been disappointing me over and over again for months now. I really love spending time wth him and I thought he liked spending time with me, but apparently he didn’t like it enough for it to be preferable to staying in his room.
And I know that he has not been thinking about the cumulative effect of every single time he fails to show up for me. Every time the possibility comes up, it’s just so much easier to say no and heave an internal sigh of great relief at all the social wear and tear and effort you just avoided.
And I am sure he doesn’t feel like he’s rejecting me/us every time, but that is definitely how it feels to me.
I mean, there’s a part of me that resists being social too. I’m an introvert as well. Being social drains me. It takes effort for me to overcome that.
But I do it because I love my friends and I love spending time with them so unless I am definitely sick, I am going to be there with and for them.
To me, all this is intuitively obvious. We express how we feel and what we care about through our priorities. When you de-prioritize people, they notice, and it hurts.
And knowing that spending time with me is not all that important to him feels like being stabbed in the heart with an icicle.
This has been building up in me for weeks and I feel better now that I let it out.
Thanks for reading it!
More after the break.
I made a thing!
This time, with the camera a decent distance from my face because I’m not recording myself with a tablet and therefore myopically needing to be close to the screen in order to see what I am doing.
Now I have a great big monitor for that, yay!
And I had fun doing some basic video editing. I’ve got all the linkages in the process working so I can record stuff whenever I like.
I’m not ready to commit to X minutes for Y days yet, but I’m getting there.
Next time I’ll comb my hair first.
My life on the Z list
I suppose I should start reading up on how to be a YouTube star.
I know I won’t enjoy it. I never enjoy reading those kinds of instructional things. I am not great at following instructions and everything I do is about self-expression so I also don’t like being told how to express myself.
Plus I lack self-discipline, I suppose.
But I will make myself read up on the basics of YouTube self-promotion so that I can get that much right at least.
I know that a big, big part of promoting your content these days is crafting the perfect title and thumbnail. And that’s kind of a drag.
But it doesn’t matter how good your video is if nobody clicks on it.
I can probably manage the title, that’s just words and I am good with words. And it might be fun coming up with clickbait-y (but honest!!) titles.
I’m willing to zazz up my content to give it maximum appeal but I am not going to use those titles that actually have almost nothing to do with the content.
God, those piss me off.
But my opinions have a tendency to be kind of provocative at times, and well, I am not above maximizing that effect in my titles.
I don’t wanna do the thumbnails though. That’s graphic design. Ick.
I hope that out there, someone has a template for Photoshop or the like where I can just type in the words and it handles the “typesetting”.
All in all, it should be interesting to finally launch myself into the much richer medium of video content instead of just doing text all the time.
Words are great but they’re limited, you know? Even mine.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.