How Do I Build a Healthy Social Life?

Good Doctor!

I have a question about social isolation, emotional overinvestment and strategies for meeting social needs. But first, some background about myself and my problem:

I’m a neurodivergent and highly sensitive trans woman in my mid-twenties, with a very difficult past behind me. And as I’m writing you this, I’m just on the cusp of coming out from the dark hole I’ve been in following a severe burnout/breakdown three years ago, when just about every single thing inside me that wasn’t working right broke down completely. It’s been hell! But I’m just on the verge of being able to leave that hell behind me, which is great! And terrifying! Because having been in hell for so long, basically unable to interact with anything beyond the immediate needs of my own mental health and close relationships (more on that in a bit) it’s like… Like I’ve forgotten how to live a normal life? And I’m at a point where the psychic repair work that’s been – out of necessity – my sole focus for these past three years is no longer cutting it, because that’s no longer where the brunt of the problem actually lies. The problem is that I’m lonely, Doc, and that I frankly have no damn idea what to do about it.

It’s a problem that goes way back into my childhood, growing up in an extremely hostile environment where others were very clear in their disdain for me taught me early on that there was no point trying to make friends… except those rare people I clicked beautifully with, with whom I’d be best friends forever!!! Until… Life happens and we drift apart, or they find other interests or activities, or a conflict comes along and makes things awkward between us… all perfectly normal and natural things, IF you have options, if you have other people to turn to, if you have the slightest bit of resilience in your social support network… which I didn’t. This is, suffice it to say, not a great environment to develop healthy boundaries or a stable sense of your own wants and needs, since placating the other into liking me was always my top priority, since if they didn’t, they’d leave me and I’d DIE, having been abandoned, all alone in the whole wide world. And if that’s not a recipe for a personality disorder, I don’t know what is.

(And before we go on, let’s all take a moment to acknowledge that Dr NerdLove is not, in fact, a real doctor. Deep breath in… Deep breath out…)

And this is, needless to say, a pattern that has followed me into my adult life. The positive thing is that I’ve had no lack of intimate relationships, even during the years following my breakdown; the negative is that they’ve all followed this same pattern of asymmetrical investment levels and emotional dependence leading to me hurting trying to be the person I think they’d want, while also putting all my emotional needs in the same basket, something that inevitably becomes too much for the other to handle, causing them to withdraw, at which point I frankly lose my shit because I have no other strategies for meeting those needs that are now just twice as unmet as they were before. It sucks, Doc. I’m so sick of things being this way, most lately being that a person who really, really loved me had to leave me, for her own sake, because the emotional strife was just too much to handle. Fuck me that hurts.

I don’t want to live this way, and I’ve done a lot, and I mean A LOT of inner work (something like 2000 handwritten pages of journaling, just this summer), consistent meditation, spending time in nature, all that stuff, working through my trauma and the ways those experiences have shaped my view and beliefs about myself, who I am, what my value is, what the approval or disapproval of others says about myself and who I am, all that good and terribly painful shadow integration. Good stuff!

But I’m also realising that it’s… not enough. Because the problem here is, at its core, that I have unmet needs. And sure, anxiously yearning for my ex to take me back or continuing to turn to her for emotional support may be terrible strategies for meeting those needs, but still, that’s what they are: Strategies for having my social and emotional needs met. And so no wonder I stick to them, since that’s all I know how to do… And that’s why I’m writing to you! Because damn do I need to find better and more adaptive ways of meeting those needs, of making friends, building social support nets, finding my people, finding meaning, joy and connection together with others; strategies for building the kind of social life that I want and need, the kind of social life that would decrease my dependence on any one person in particular, thus allowing me to have actually healthy relationships – romantic or platonic – rather than just perpetuating the tracks of my own childhood trauma. So. Where do I start?

Climbing Back Out Of Hell

So, there’s a temptation to say “well, if you’re aware that you’re doing this thing every time, have you considered not doing it?” and calling it a day. But that’s not actually, y’know helpful (nor does it make for great reading material).

At the same time, this is also an example of why I tell people so often that what they need is therapy, not a loudmouth with an advice column. Even when you’re profoundly self-aware and you are doing your best to keep up with your shadow work and deal with those emotional wounds, there’re limits to how much DIY you can do for mental health care. So while I think some self-guided exercises like MoodGym can be useful, I think this is an area where having a professional, who is not only getting paid to listen but also has no compunctions of telling you when you’re going overboard or veering into Too Much territory – is necessary. In fact, they have professional incentives to tell you this. And even when they aren’t throwing up a warning flare, sometimes what you need is someone who’s less of a friend and more of a Professional Ear. Even if all they’re doing is being the sounding board to all of the weasels in your brain screaming their anxieties all at once, having someone who is going to sit there and listen and then say “that sounds like a lot, have you considered…” can be invaluable.

Now with that in mind, and the full recognition that Dr. NerdLove is not a real doctor, I do think it’s also important to have some strategies in place to at least mitigate these issues while you’re working on healing those wounds. And in a somewhat amusing (at least to me) reversal, this is a time when I would point out that the same things that help build strong, resilient and successful romantic relationships also help build strong, resilient and successful platonic relationships.

Case in point: one of the factors that helps a relationship survive is to not treat your partner as your sole source of companionship, support and intimacy. One of the keys to a strong relationship – platonic or romantic, sexual or chaste – is to have other people in your life who perform different roles.

This is going to be a weird metaphor but stick with me for a second. Anyone who’s practiced tumbling or studied martial arts – especially grappling and throwing styles like judo or jiu-jitsu – will spend a great deal of time at the start learning how to fall without hurting themselves. The key to minimizing damage when you’re falling is to spread out the area of impact. It’s basic physics; when the point of impact is constrained to one small area, the amount of force (and thus, damage) applied to that area is increased. By spreading out the area of impact, you spread out the amount of force applied, thus lowering the force applied to any one spot. While the overall strength of the impact is the same, because it’s spread over a wider area, the effect of the impact on the body is significantly lessened and thus you suffer less damage (if any).

Well so it is with relationships. Having more people in your life, who play different roles and serve different functions all helps to spread out the amount of time, attention and investment you’re expecting from any one person. Right now, you end up in situations where any individual person ends up chafing under the expectation that they are going to be All Things to you. That creates quite a bit of pressure and, unsurprisingly, you find the relationship creaking and cracking under the strain. Spreading out that time and attention amongst other people makes it much easier to avoid straining your relationships because you have different people helping meet different needs.

This is one of the reasons why it’s frequently a good thing to have what one might consider “specialist” friends – friends who fill a particular role or niche in your social network. You may, for example, have your Political Friend, who you can rant and rave about what our elected officials are fucking up this time or how the media’s one-sided coverage in the name of selling the horse race is damaging democracy. You may also have your Pop Culture Friend, who you go to when you want to squee about the latest plot developments in Demon Slayer or trade theories about characters in Rings of Power. There can be friends who you turn to for talking travel, for talking money, tech… pretty much any niche or interest you may have. Many of them may fill multiple roles, too; your Pop Culture friend may also be who you go to to talk about video games or books, your Political Friend may also be your Activist Friend or your Horror Movie friend. And all of them can help provide emotional support, distraction and companionship – each in different ways and at different times. Because you have these different friends, who occupy different roles, you spread out your attention and your time in ways that helps disperse the total impact of that attention. As a result, you get disparate and discrete needs met without overwhelming any one person.

As an aside: what’s often odd to me is how often this idea gets pushback; there’s a lot of ingrained cultural narratives that friends and lovers should mesh in damn near all things in order to last. While that’s a nice idea as a fantasy, in practice, you end up with far fewer friends and relationships that often end up failing under the strain of too much togetherness… often leaving one in the position of having their entire social network fall apart at the same time. Having a wider network may be shallower in places… but that’s not a bad thing.

In fact, this is also an area where the difference between a scarcity mentality and an abundance mentality comes into play. In this case, one of the biggest and most significant mistakes that you, CBOOH, are making is that you’re functionally treating each and every person you meet as though they’re the keystone to your social needs. You’re investing each individual person with the idea that they are your deepest and bestest friend and confidant, in no small part because you are carrying this belief that they are the last and only person you could confide in and rely on. It creates a frustrating catch-22 of needing people in your life for the sake of improving your mental health, but the need to improve your mental health is what makes it harder to connect with people to meet those needs.

But here’s the thing: in working towards an abundance mentality with regard to friends and a social network, you also make it possible to have shallower, less intense friendships with any one individual person while you’re working on your mental health. You don’t, for example, need to be sharing your deepest, darkest and most intimate secrets with the person who you like sharing dank gaming memes with. You don’t necessarily need to be besties with the people you would hang out with to go see a hockey game or catch a movie with or talk shit about politics over beers. By allowing yourself to have a wider diversity of people to talk to, you’re able to meet your needs for companionship and continue doing the work to address your mental health so that you’re better equipped to transition some of these relationships into more intimate ones.

Yes, this mindset can require a certain amount of compartmentalization and a willingness to hold yourself back. It can feel a little cold or mechanical… but in practice, it’s really anything but. It’s more accurate to say that this is a form of caring – for yourself and for them. You’re functionally saying “I value you and what you bring to this relationship and so in order to preserve it, I have to be a bit reserved for now. But in the future, when I’m doing better, that reserve means that I won’t have put an immense strain on our connection before I have the tools to help take them to the next level in a healthy way.”

And, I might point out, embracing those weak ties and holding yourself back is what makes it more likely that you will deepen those relationships. After all, it takes hours upon hours to go from strangers to acquaintances, from acquaintances to friends and from friends to close friends. Holding back a bit means that you have more opportunities to put those hours in at a much more measured pace instead of trying to speedrun the process and ending up, as you said, creating asymmetrical levels of investment and the inevitable withdrawl from the relationship. Holding yourself back allows them to invest at a more reasonable rate too, especially if they’re someone who doesn’t dive headfirst into new friendships with abandon.

So while I’m going to reiterate my call for you to hie thyself to a therapist’s couch, I think you’ll do well to look for (and even welcome) shallower, more specialized connections so that you spread out the total surface area of your attention. While each person may not be meeting your needs in total, the cumulative effect means that those needs get met without overwhelming any particular person. And once you are in better working order and have a better toolset to hand, it’ll be that much easier to pick and choose which of those friendships would be ones that’re worth exploring into a deeper and more intimate way.

Good luck.

***

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

Being a black man in America has its challenges. Being a nerd in black spaces wasn’t easy either. Growing up was difficult, and finding a genuine appreciation for who I am has been one of the greatest victories of my adult life. I practice martial arts every day, I play a ton of table top RPGs, and I love anime. I really love what I love, but I am struggling to find other people of color in the spaces where my interests are in full display.

I’ve lived in LA, NY, several towns in the south, and I am currently living in DC. The black population in these cities are massive, but when I go to Friday Night Magic the Gathering, or D&D meet ups I am always one of the few non-white people there. I’m used to being the only black guy at these places, but what I find frustrating is that as soon as another non-white person shows up there is an aversion of being seen together. As a person who would be considered overweight, I have experienced this before. You find yourself in a room full of people, the last thing you want to do is be next to another fat person in hopes that you don’t become a larger target of attention.

I know that as an elder nerd of color it is my job to make it easier for other nerds, specifically nerds of color, to be themselves. As someone who really didn’t have a safe place to be fully authentic this is my priority in theses spaces. This sentiment goes double for women, the disabled, or neurodivergent. Doing this, I find myself afraid to flirt. I don’t want to ruin the space, make it so someone doesn’t want to come back.

Being fully transparent, I am a kinda fit, kinda fat, self loving dork, who is looking for someone with my shared racial experience. Where are we?

Nerd Like Me

Let’s start off with an obvious disclaimer: I’m a cis, hetero, middle-aged white guy, so I’m not going to have the same perspective or experiences as younger POC nerds would, and I am almost going to miss or be ignorant of angles and issues related to this. So my thoughts and opinions should be taken with all applicable amounts of salt and skepticism.

I have, however, been around for a while and I have Seen Some Shit as geek fandoms and interests have evolved, so I can say with certainty that there’re a lot of POC in all the various flavors of geekdom. Whether they’re anime fans, TTRPG fans, console or PC gamers, comic nerds, SF/F nerds… they’re out there and in numbers.

Which then brings up the very question asked: where are they all?

Well, the obvious answer is “online”, but that doesn’t necessarily help when you want to go spend time with your peers who have shared experiences and values.

I suspect that the issue is that they’re all having the same issue that you are: they go to organized events and find themselves in the minority, if not the only POC at the event. And I suspect that, like you, they feel a pressure to avoid being singled out or defined by how they stand out from the rest.

And to be fair, I also suspect a lot of the organizers and participants may not be aware of how they end up isolating or making those individuals feel singled out or unwelcome. Geek and nerd interests aren’t exclusively white or male but Valen knows a lot of the participants make it feel that way at times.

(Call it an incredibly unfortunate mix of not recognizing systemic issues, a certain amount of self-mythologizing amongst the geek set and a whooooole lot of “ironic” racism from the 4chan-poisoned crowd. And that’s before we get into the “nope, just straight up racist, bigoted assholes” folks who are frequently there, too.)

I suspect that the issue here is, honestly, a lot of folks are hoping to find their people by sheer chance and serendipity. This is often true across the racial and gender spectrums, but especially for people of color in geek communities. They go to these organized events, find that they are the only POC or one of a handful and get demoralized. Maybe some stop looking and just stick to the groups that they know, where they’ve already gotten to know folks. Maybe some quit going at all.

But the unifying issue would be that they’re going to events being organized by other people, and those feel like that’s all there is.

Now, maybe this is an issue that could be mitigated by more research. In a metropolitan area as wide and diverse as DC is, I would find it surprising if there weren’t already groups or events – online and in person – for POC nerds to get together and have a proper geekout. But seeing as fandom has long been dominated by white, cis, male voices (both in fandom but also in media/publishing/development roles), it’s not really surprising that most of the people who try to organize events tend to be white, cis and male. So relying on already extant groups, events and communities means that you (and they) end up relying on groups and communities and events that were designed, consciously or unconsciously, in ways that may make you feel unwelcome or singled out.

So, seeing how you haven’t found a group that has meets your needs, maybe the answer is to organize a meetup specifically for other POC nerds like you to meet and mingle and realize there’re far more of them than they realized. Somebody’s gotta take the reins to fill that empty niche and it may as well be you.

This doesn’t need to be any big thing; you don’t need to suddenly have ambitions of running your own con or a nationwide event. But using social media to find and connect with other black nerds in your area who want to play Magic or D&D or talk Jujutsu Kaisen and Spy X Family can be a first step towards an informal get together at your local gaming store. Do it a few times and a small number of folks getting together every couple of weeks ends up becoming a full-bore event as word spreads and more folks hear about it and show up to check it out.

Sometimes the answer really is “if you build it, they will come.”

By the by, I’d like to toss this out to my readers: if you’re someone who’s had similar experiences and organized geek events or communities for fellow POC nerds, I want to invite you to share your experiences and insights on this topic. Your input on the subject is going to be invaluable.

Another thing to consider is that you may also want to push back against that worry of being singled out when you see other non-white nerds at these gatherings and hang with them anyway. The self-isolation is understandable, but the fear of being labeled and defined is also perpetuating the separation. Sometimes you have to be willing to say “fuck what people may think” and do it anyway. Helping build a more convivial, less isolating atmosphere even within these extant groups can help make other people – folks who are less assertive or feel less empowered to make the first move – feel welcome and encourage their attendance and participation too.

Yeah, it’d be great if finding your fellow nerds didn’t require effort like this on your part. But unfortunately, as you know far better than I, we live in a world where a lot of racism and racial ignorance is baked into day to day living and where standards and norms are based around what white people expect. But I suspect this is an area where, once someone gets the ball rolling, it’ll start to take on a life of its own. It just needs that initial push.

Sounds like you might be the right man to make that first push.

Good luck.

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