Talking About Loneliness as a Way of Blogging

So I am not alone in my current preoccupation with loneliness, which should probably come as no surprise at all. Still I found this interview in the January edition of the Believer with Thomas Dumm about his new book, Loneliness as a Way of Life interesting enough to alleviate the sadness that my loneliness doesn’t, you know, make me special.

Except, I really am at my limit of being able to think about this and write about this. It’s drowning everything else out, not because I am lonely, but because I just would like not to be so incessantly conscious of myself. And the things I do during the day, the social networking, the blogging, the reading self-conscious fiction, even the parenting and the conversations I have with myself doing homework, offer no relief… I went to see Revolutionary Road by myself this weekend and all I could get out of it was “we were supposed to be special.” No relief there. Actually, the best relief I’ve found is is doing music with the kids.

I put up, on facebook, my list of 25 things about myself, mentioning how the internet sometimes feels like a giant narcissism machine, because it doesn’t feel right for me to be all the time going on about how myself, the way that will inflate my sense of self-importance until, quite seriously, I can be making up the bed and start trying to come up with a cute facebook status update about it, which, no, the world does not need. But my friend Wende, who has a track record of calling me on it when my self-deprecating edges into not being kind to myself, pointed out that things I have written about myself have been helpful to her, and also questioned my notion that facebook and the sudden presence in your life of people from all of your different pasts can make reinventing yourself impossible.

This was my answer to her:

Oh, thank you for the thoughtful wall post. I think this is possibly a blog entry, but I wanted to answer you specifically — that I worry about narcissism being toxic not because of what YOU will think of me but because it opens up the cracks where self-loathing comes in. Trying to give you the condensed version of what my morning pages were all about this morning…

When we give a kid encouragement, the current thinking seems to be, you give them something concrete on what they’ve just done just now… Not “you’re such a good artist” but “I really like all the different colors you used in that picture and how well you captured the shape of the tree.” Sort of like correcting behavior? Not “You’re so selfish” but “When you grab the toy from your brother he is sad and I don’t want him to be sad.” One kind of attention is affirming, but the other kind… when someone tells me I am something, even something good, like a good mother, a little voice in my head thinks of all the times I have messed up as their mother, that you don’t know about — but if you point out how I just listened to my kid, that’s encouraging and it builds evidence in my head for my being a good mother.

I do in my heart of hearts believe that if everybody spent time writing and examining their own feelings and actions the world would be a better place, but the writing I am thinking about would have to be more like examining behaviors than labelling selves — the self is a squishy thing that, when we pin it down with a label, comes oozing out somewhere else. And I feel like when I am writing about myself and my experiences, if I keep it at a level of seeking universal truths through examining my experiences, that is, if the me part of it is less important, it is useful, but if I start coming up with labels for myself, good or bad, that’s the narcissism creeping in, I end up really struggling against the self-hatred. It isn’t that I hate myself, mind you, it’s that I’ve woken up too many mornings regretting having talked too much the night before, I get weary of my own voice. I cannot silence the stories I make up in my head of how other people are perceiving me.

And this is apparently all I’ve been writing about and thinking about lately, I only just made the connection to “labelling” this morning as I was thinking about why it was hard to reinvent myself on Facebook. The thing is I can remember perhaps teasingly or lovingly being labelled as self-absorbed or the walking dictionary, can remember having it implied I was more interested in ideas than people’s feelings, being told again and again who I was — the smart or bookishness somehow implying some other deficiency — and how it shaped how people treated me, and how I reacted to them. But in new situations, with new people I was free to try different strategies for connecting. I know that my Meyers-Briggs profile is very different when I am parenting than when I am an employee, and even the label is a projected one, I think of how often we become what people expect of us.

Anyway, I’ll try to mellow on the self-deprecating, and I do appreciate your calling me on it, I always find your notes so supportive and loving and appreciate them so much.

Lots of love,

Mara