expect more from my friends

Thankfully, last night’s fit of “amphetamine psychosis” has more or less passed. That said, having a evening of that sort of underscores how difficult this particular goal is for me. I think maybe it’s a failure of conception…there are actually a whole bunch of things wrapped up in this, from “being more discerning” and “choosing my friends wisely” to “seeing who people are and accepting the limitations on what they can or are willing to give”, to “being who I am without undue apology”, “not suffering fools gladly”, and the twin towers of “not putting myself in situations that I find unpleasant” and “not subjecting myself unnecessarily to the company of those I find unpleasant”. I dunno. It’s a complicated business.

That said, I do think I did a good thing today, in this vein. Kind of in the “fuck you” line, but in a classier and lower-impact sort of way. Just kind of doing what’s best for me. So I went over to the student union after class for a cup of coffee with a friend of mine, and this woman who is kind of my friend but who has been causing me some grief (because, well, she’s actually not all that friendly) joined us. So we all sat and chatted for awhile, and then my coffee was empty. I’d made a rule for myself regarding this person, a couple of weeks ago, that I wasn’t going to stick around places where she was once I started to be bothered. Haven’t lived up to that, but tonight I did. She was kind of bugging me, and the whole quality of our interaction was kind of bugging me, and so I simply got up when my coffee was done and excused myself and went home. No fuss, no drama, just removing myself from a situation that I wasn’t likely to enjoy prolonging any further. I felt pretty good about that. I feel pretty good about that. Need to do more of it…removing myself from situations that have begun to be unpleasant. So. Yeah.

I don’t know. The last few days I’ve been laboring under this free-floating conviction that I’m a loathsome creep who has managed to piss off or alienate everyone who has been even remotely close to him in recent times. The saying of the fuck-yous has been a part of that, I think, or at least the sort of self-inflicted aftermath has been. I was right to tell the particular people in question that I’d had enough, but that has also encouraged me to raise my standards for friendly interaction, which, while a good thing in certain respects, also brings some attendant problems if one really lives it. I dunno.

It may partly be amphetamine psychosis—someone I used to know, back in undergrad days, defined that term to me one night when I happened to be having one of those moments where I was suddenly, absolutely convinced that everyone hated me, and with good reason. I informed her, once she’d floated the term, that I’d never been near amphetamines at all. “That doesn’t matter,” she told me. “It actually has nothing to do with the drugs.”

So. I may well just be having an amphetamine psychosis week (or, give a nod to a variant terminology, immortalized in song by the Sisters of Mercy back in the day, “Amphetamine Logic”). I dunno. Maybe it’s just a case of raising one’s standards and then realizing, from tha elevated vantage, that where one is at is rendered more problematic by the act of deciding to expect more. Still, it looks pretty bleak just at this moment. So.

So, I think I’m going to go to bed. Sometimes that’s the best thing to do. Yeah. Cheers.

This goal actually intersects with a number of the other goals I’ve added in recent days…the “remembering who I am” one, and also the “not being so hard on myself” one, which is really about giving myself some due respect as much as anything else. Also, the “be more confident” goal. Anyway.

I have tended to feel pretty isolated, socially, since I’ve been up here in Flagstaff, partly because I learned how to interact effectively with people during the time I lived in the Big Apple, and the directness with which people tend to speak to each other there is not quite so acceptable as it is in these parts. People often don’t seem to know quite what to do with that. Also, most of my grad school colleagues are either straight-out-of-undergrad, or they’re going back to school in their fifties or sixties or what have you; me, I’m in this sort of generational twilight zone, being thirty-five and not having too many peers in terms of my own level of life experience, or in terms of where I’m at in my life now, or what I’m doing here, doing this thing I’m doing in this place.

I’ve generally been adopting a “conservation of social connections” strategy, which involves trying to tone down my own approach to social interactions, and to not make too much of a stink when someone offends me or treats me a bit shabbily, especially when it’s something that I can explain away as an inevitable consequence of either the generational divide or the cultural divide between New York and Arizona.

This past week, though, two of the people who have nominally fallen into the “friends” category were kind of shitty to me in ways that have been kind of in line with the sorts of stuff I’ve been finding ways to excuse away. And rather than just trying to continue to excuse all that away (which I’m sure I could have done, I’m very accomplished at making excuses for others), I stopped doing that. I let each of them know that that isn’t the way friends, or even congenial acquaintances, treat each other, and if that’s how they were going to treat me, well, then I really didn’t have much use for them going forward. I don’t need that kind of shit in my life, and I don’t deserve it from anyone, much less from people that I am expected to treat with affection, friendship and respect. So.

It’s kind of a shame to have to do that with people in one’s life, but at the same time I think that just saying “enough” was a really good step for me. After all, if I don’t respect myself enough to call foul on someone who is treating me badly, then who else is going to respect me? Yeah. So. Progress.