I went to a family reunion yesterday, and drank slightly too much because I’m a garbage human being, and left as soon as politely possible.
There’s nothing wrong with my side of the family, by the way. We have nothing in common, as far as I can tell, but they’re perfectly nice people. For whatever reason I just cannot handle being around them. We have these things annually now and it’s two hours of me being mildly-to-moderately uncomfortable and wondering how obvious it is that I’m mildly-to-moderately uncomfortable while various relatives make pointed comments about how they haven’t seen me in a year.
This blog is predicated, in part, on the fact that few people actually know me because I put very little effort into my friendships and almost zero effort into my familial relationships outside the people who live with me, so if I don’t write about myself people will never have any idea what I’m about. When people directly ask how I am or what I’m doing, I just say something vague instead of giving an honest answer. I assume people won’t understand, so I don’t give it a chance. This is a bad reason to be a recluse who only communicates with strangers on the Internet. I can most certainly come up with a better reason than that.
I could say, “this is the way I am,” but that’s BS. I can change, if I devote the time and energy. I’ve simply chosen not to. A family reunion would have been a good time to make an effort, since they’re all gathered in one place and can be cornered at will, but of course I didn’t, I just spent the whole time being uncomfortable and wanting to leave.
Recently, I have been making an effort to improve. I call my mother, for instance. I don’t like talking on the phone, but she does, so I try to stay focused and be a good listener. I even toyed with the idea of using my Facebook account a couple times a week to maintain some semblance of a presence since they’re all on Facebook. I break out in mental hives every time I think about logging into Facebook, but–look, if I can’t handle the meatspace, that’s the alternative, and it’s on my ’turf’ at least.