Friendship and Trust

 I almost cannot believe it is the last week of July. I have done essentially no work for school since June 16. I promised myself that it's all right not to start prep for fall semester until August 1. I have a lecture for D&D Camp this Wednesday that I am working on, and one thing for an independent study student due the end of this week, but otherwise I'm giving myself permission to just coast awhile longer.

The big problem is still there: still big and still a problem. Last week I had several days in a row when things seemed to be improving. I ate more, I slept more, I felt more positive and hopeful. Cypar and I had a very good weekend together. It's such a disappointment to find that all of that hasn't made the problem go away. I really haven't knit at all since mid-June. I don't have the spoons for it when I'm concentrating so much on dealing with this other problem. 

My therapist and I have been talking about friendship. Why do I feel that I don't have many friends? What has to happen for me to consider someone a friend? Have I always felt this way, or only recently? I then feel sort of deficient for not making friends more easily. I seem to be setting the bar much too high. My suspicion is that it's a combination of moving to a new state when I was growing up (leaving all my friends behind and having to start over in the new place) plus having a bad time with low self-esteem in graduate school (the people I hung out with treated me disrespectfully but I kept hanging out with them because I didn't think I could find anyone better) plus the normal experience that it just is more difficult to make friends once a person leaves school. I guess I don't know how to develop a friendship beyond the initial "hey, you're interesting" phase. 

Besides that, it appears that I am not a generally trusting person. I do not just assume other people have good intentions or are trustworthy until proven otherwise; I typically wait for evidence that the other person is trustworthy first. For example, Cypar and I discussed M., a person we both know. Cypar says he trusts M. completely, they have worked together, hung out together, and traveled together. Cypar doesn't like everything that M. does, but he still says he trusts M. I, on the other hand, do not trust M. I think M. would go through my cabinets if he thought he could get away with it. I don't like the way M. has tried to take advantage of Cypar in the past. I don't like the way M. talks about certain subjects. Cypar was surprised by my lack of trust in M. and seems genuinely unable to understand why I feel that way.

So, if I find it hard to trust people that would also prevent me from feeling close or friendly with them. After all this, I am feeling pretty unhappy because it's all my own fault that I have constructed barriers between myself and other people to keep them at arm's length. And if that's true, what do I even do about it? How do I change? How do I even convince myself that change is worthwhile?

Loyalty Circles

This week was a little better: I once went 48 hours without crying, I ate a full meal Thursday night, and I slept almost the whole night a couple of times. There has been almost daily conversations with Cypar, which usually helps. Sometimes I get myself all worked up (not "for nothing" of course, but maybe out of proportion) and then it's still difficult to regain equilibrium.

My therapist this week wanted me to talk about my family and we drew a big map of all the relationships. Her board wasn't really large enough for everything; I wonder what she does with a person who has a bigger family? Mine is so small. She also included people I consider close friends (that made me sad because the list is so short). She let me just describe each person in whatever way came to mind, and it was pretty stream-of-consciousness. She asked how I knew those people loved me and I tried to think about that. At one point I said something about how I didn't know what I was going to do, going forward, and she said "what has changed?" That question has stuck with me all week. Okay, so I know some things I didn't know before, and they are unhappy things, but is anything actually different? Well...yes and no? I don't know. My brain says nothing has changed. I'm the same person, doing all the same things. I don't feel the same, though. I feel sad, hurt, and scared.

I was trying to talk about this with Cypar afterward. I often visualize my relationships as concentric circles (not necessarily coplanar, though, more like the orbits of planets and comets around the sun). The smallest, closest circles are the people closest to me (do I need to explicitly state that I'm the center of the circles? okay I am), who I feel the most responsibility for. So Cypar is in the first circle, and there's a separate circle for people in my family, and another circle for my department colleagues. I feel different levels of loyalty and responsibility for people in different circles. For example, the guys at work I feel responsibility to take care of their needs because I'm their chairperson. Even when they are acting in ways I dislike, I still feel protective of them. But faculty in other departments are not my responsibility and mostly I am fine letting them fend for themselves. I once tried to explain this to my Dean, when she was first hired, because at the time there was a discussion of whether the sole physics faculty person would be a department of one or combined with my department.

I was just trying to say that I need to know what circle that person belongs to, so that I know how much energy to devote to thinking about their needs. The Dean basically blew me off. That was the last time I tried to talk to her about anything personal.

Anyway, the point is that I feel deep loyalty and responsibility for the people in certain circles, but not for people in other circles. When a new person enters my life I guess I try to figure out which circle they fit into. People can move between circles, for example a person I met recently can become a closer friend over time. I have chucked people out of circles, rarely. I don't like to do that. I always try to keep those people in some kind of circle as long as I can.