Last night, I had a call with one of my friends. I think it was the first time I just sat down and had a chat with someone in at least six months (the last time was when I got to see a friend in-person for the first time in years and we met up after a wedding to get lunch and just talk, which was honestly really great except for the fact that I don’t remember half of it because I was so tired that my head was full of cotton). Most of the time when I talk to people, it’s to serve a particular purpose. Sometimes it’s to plan an event, sometimes it’s to play a game together (video or online tabletop), and sometimes its to provide emotional support. Rarely, these days, do I ever sit down with people, in person or on the phone, to just shoot the shit. Which, in retrospect, is probably part of the reason I’ve been struggling with feelings of isolation for a while now. I love talking to people for no purpose other than to talk, but it’s really difficult to do since most people are busy and it’s much easier to plan an activity with other people than to just set aside time to exist with each other in companionable conversation or silence, whichever happens.

This, of course, did not fix all of my problems. I don’t think anything short of a few hundred thousand dollars will do that, to be honest, given how many of my problems exist because of systemic issues and my financial position restricting the choices I can make in my life. It did help me a lot, though. My friend also said it was helpful for him, so we’re going to try to make it a thing we do every week. Not on a regular schedule, since stuff comes up and we’re not always available, but something we’ll try to schedule every week so we can just connect for a bit and talk. It’s not easy, life these days, and just having someone to talk to about stuff is nice. Personally, I’m trying to avoid making it about games we’re playing together since we have a tendency to fall into that kind of strategic and planning chatter every time we talk (even when we’re actively playing a different game and should probably stay focused on that). I’m also trying to avoid turning it into a social space where I’m constantly venting about things. I’ve got enough other venues for that (including this blog!) and I want to just enjoy my conversation with my friend. I won’t stop myself from talking about difficult stuff or our emotional health if the conversation goes there, but I’m trying to avoid that becoming the focus. It can be draining and we’re both of us having a difficult time these days, so I want to avoid negative feedback loops.

Having this kind of access to people is one of the things I miss the most about my time in college (which has now been over for a decade, no matter how you look at it, since even the job I had at my college for six months after graduating has officially been over for a decade and when you read this, it will have been eight days short of a decade since I moved to my current city). I miss being able to find people to chat with whenever I’d go looking for it. I miss the ease of community I experienced back then and haven’t experienced since, no matter how much other places have tried to recreate the experience. I miss being able to occupy spaces that allowed other people to easily approach. I miss the intentionally open organization of my college’s community. I miss wandering into the library and looking through the study rooms until I found a group of people I knew and could join to silently work beside. I miss occupying space next to other people and not needing to do anything but be near each other.

This, for me, is the core of why I’m still talking with one of my groups of friends about creating a communal living situation some day, despite how little progress we’ve all made towards this goal over the past several years. We’d all buy some land and do our best to set it up in as green a way as possible. We’d have lots of communal spaces but also slightly removed private spaces that we could retreat to (since a lot of us are introverts at heart). We’d grow our own food, handle our own animals, take care of the land we owned, and do whatever creative pursuits we wanted to do in order to help fill in the gaps between our home production capabilites and our domestic needs (for instance, we all want to make sure we still have good internet access). It would be nice. It’s probably never going to happen (we’ve introduced a few alternatives in recent years, like buying adjacent homes and combining our backyards), but it’s nice to think about as I wander through my apartment by myself and consider if I’m too tired to climb the stairs between me and all my video game consoles or if I should actually just drop into the lounge downstairs and read whatever book I left there the last time I gave up on stairs.

Still, I think I’ve reinforced the idea that I need to spend more time with people enough that it’ll stick this time. I have this realization, that I don’t just hang out with people or just shoot the shit anymore every few weeks and only this time have I actually acted on it. I hope I don’t get so burned out that I can’t handle a simple phone call, but I think that being able to just have the phone call at all will go a long ways to preventing me from burning out that badly. After all, it’s very refreshing to to talk to people. As long as it’s not for too long, you know?