Learning to be Human

Ive spent a LOT of time belong alone; not just in the physical sense but also in the psychological sense.
I have become an extremely independent person as a result. This super-power comes with its own problems.

It was extremely hard for me to figure out how to hold space for my friends in my life.

The perils of being alone

For the longest time I could not figure out how to hang out with other people without any agenda or without doing anything for them.

However, the moment the agends is removed I seem to lose it. It's like my brain does not know how to just be in the precense of another human. I had to find creative ways to keep my mind occipied.

Now, this was obviously not a nice thing to go through. I want to be able to just hang-out with my friends without any specific agenda. I wanted to learn how to spend time with people just for the sake of spending time with them. This is the true essence of relationships.

Playing the wrong game

Let me try and explain this with an analogy.

Imagine you are playing an open-world game (like GTA Vice-City). There are two very distinct types of play that can happen within this game. The first one is where you complete the main missions and the second one is where you explore the world, doing the side-missions etc etc.

The game mechanism is structured such that completion only counts if you complete the main missions and not the side-missions / exploration. This is crucial. The incentives of the game are such that players are incentivized to only play the main missions.

Now of-course when I played the video-game, I wasn't just playing the main-missions. I just ended up roaming around the city and exploring it and it was FUN. We will come back to this later.

Why is this analogy important ? It is important because for the largest time I used to treat spending time with my friends/family as side-quests. I used to budget time so that I would have enough time to do my main-missions. This is obviously silly. I wanted to un-learn this.

Now of-course a LOT of this is due to the fact that I need to re-charge my social battery as well. If I were to assign numbers, I'd say that the social battery thing accounts for like 30% of the reasons and the rest is all attributable to the main vs side-quests mentality.

In my mind there was a clear distinction between things that I want to do alone and things that I do because I have to do them because I live in a society. Every time I spend time with friends, it feels like I am not doing something else that I could do only for myself. Time spent in the company of friends should not feel this weird. I am not saying that the time I spent with friends is unenjoyable. It is immensely enjoyable, but there is that lingering feeling in the back of my head which likes to say "you could have run 5 km instead".

Dating ...

Clearly all of this does not translate to being very good at dating etc. My total cumulative non-single experience is less than 3 years in this 28 years of existence. It is what it is.

Dating is something that I have never paid any attention to. Like I said, there was something better to do. ALL. THE. TIME.

Now that I am getting older and a bunch of my friends etc are getting married / having kids; it does feel slightly weird. A certain younger version of me is definitely disappointed in me because of this.

In light of what I have said above, it is not rocket science to figure out why I am okay with this situation. Dating just feels too unnatural to me.

This. Needs. Fixing.

I can not expect another person to be in my life if I do not make any space for them to occupy.

I need to make space.

What to do about it ?

Well, the gist of the matter is that I am too good at being alone and I am trying to be better at not-be-alone.
The key is to get used to the presence of another human.

It can be as simple as playing a different game in the same universe.

Let's see how this goes. It is an uphill battle for sure.