Working my way back to you, babes

In which I go on about belonging and not belonging and being alone in public

In the summer, I quit my job and spent a couple months figuring out what was next for me. Turns out it was what came before. Going it on my own.

This May marked 18 years for me in St. John’s, which the longest I’ve ever stayed in one place, but also the longest I’ve ever been away from “cultural capitals” like Toronto or New York. It’s life on the edge—literally in the geographic sense, metaphorically in the literary sense. I am on a rock at the eastern most reaches of the continent, and in a literary world that is also an island, in a way, being cut off from the bases of production in the rest of the country. That said, because it’s at such a remove, it’s sort of its own centre and has its own unique culture, and I’m in the middle of it all. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, whether it’s on the local, provincial, or national level, it’s that being a big fish in a small pond is like bragging that you’re on the Olympic cross country team, but the country is Lichtenstein. It’s nice to make it to the top of your game, but it’s not a lot of country to cross, you know?

Despite having lived in and enjoyed big cities like Toronto and New York, I am really a small town person. I grew up in Southwestern and Central Ontario, mostly in tiny towns (but with a few-year stint in Brampton—which was Ontario’s unwashed armpit at the time—though I hear it’s undergone quite the renaissance, kind of like Hamilton.) After that I moved to Toronto for a solid seven years, then rural Italy, and eventually Manhattan. But before Newfoundland, my time in Toronto was the longest I ever spent in one place.

Anyway, St. John’s has largely been a great choice, especially for raising kids, but sometimes I miss big centres and the art hubs they host. I arrived in St. John’s in 2006, having moved back to Canada after years in New York City where I was torn between enjoying the incredible art, music, and literary offerings and fearing for my life if some whack-job got ahold of a dirty bomb or decided to pilot something into my building.

Anyway, I have been here in St. John’s for long enough that all the kids think of themselves as Newfoundlanders (one was even born here) and use the island as base for adventuring out into the world. We own two houses here, even with our measly writerly incomes (the joy of cost of living differences), and we have great lifelong friends and colleagues. It’s sort of ideal. And yet these last few years…

I’ve felt restless.

No matter where I’ve gone and no matter what I’ve done in life, I have never felt like I belonged. It doesn’t matter how lovely the place is, how welcoming the people are, how much they listen and laugh, how many invites I receive to keep company—I have always felt in any group a bit like a bewildered anthropologist taking field notes.

And St. John’s is, in the end, no exception. Despite being welcomed and having great friends, I do feel like an outsider. Many people here have friends and allegiances and grudges they’ve been nursing since primary school. The town is small enough that even if they might not know someone, they know of them, and who their people are and how they’re related to everyone else. So I often find myself lost in the web of loyalties and love and hurt feelings that people here established before I arrived. Besides that, Newfoundlanders have a keen sense for who is, and who isn’t a Newf. And they know I’m not. And I won’t be, no matter how long I stay. They will never let me forget.

I mean, it’s not been much different elsewhere, I guess. The real problem with fitting in is that, once you leave your family of origin, the people you find yourself crossing paths in life with are not blank slates and will enter your awareness with whatever level of enthusiasm or indifference they are capable of at the time. And they’ll come with baggage. Everyone does.

When I moved to Toronto, I found a group of writers and friends who had plenty of social dynamics behind them, and the same in New York City with my pals in MFAs at NYU, Columbia and New School. And all the small towns before that, where I lived a few years here and a few years there. I made friends, but never felt settled, or fully aware of all what was happening socially, or why people acted the way they did.

People have stuff going on in their lives, and while we might have a good time hanging out, someone like me, who is already socially stymied for a variety of reasons, just can’t break in when there’s years and years of intense friendship already in that social space. (It feels a like bit like trying too hard, which is something my generation has always despised.)

I suppose this is part of the condition of being an oddball, but also partly due to being itinerant in nature. And that was something that was easy to accept when I was always leaving after three to five years. But now that I’ve decided to stay, I wondered if something would change. Would the “taxi light” above me that signals I am open to new friendships turn on or turn off?

I’m over half a century old now, and I would say I have much less than half the “friends” I once had. Maybe this is partly because my standards for what constitutes an actual friend (as opposed to a colleague you have drinks with now and then) have changed. But it’s also because I go out less often, and therefore meet new people less often.

Before the pandemic, I spent a lot of time out of the house, going to events and working on my writing. I liked to work in public. I had regular spots I’d go to and people would know to find me there. Back in Toronto it was a Second Cup at Lippencott and Bloor. In NYC it was a café on Christopher Street. In St. John’s it was The Duke of Duckworth or a small café at the top of Long’s Hill. I could sit in public and write and have the occasional hello-have-you-met-my-friend-X? It was enough to have a quick visit and then back to my own interior chaos to work on art. I liked being alone among other people.

Since the pandemic, I’ve been stuck inside or looking to get home as quickly as possible. This means it’s been three years of isolation, mostly with the family. Because I’m inherently introverted, not seeing other people didn’t really bother me for much of that time, but recently I started to notice something… As my friendship circles dwindled or faded, so did my writing.

Instead of sitting down to work, I found myself in a spiral of waiting-for-something-to-happen and killing-time-for-the-same-reasons. It was like ADHD paralysis writ large. I was just…existing. The moment I wasn’t able to be in public to work on my stuff, I stopped working altogether. It seems counterintuitive, but the busier a place gets, the easier it is for me, a middle aged dude who is just learning about his own neurodiversity, to work in it. There was something about the bustle that was invigorating, but also unobtrusive.

When I stopped going out, I didn’t realize at first that I missed the white noise of public and the comings and goings of others—the cacophony of voices. Part of being even marginally neurodiverse in the way I am is that I have a hard time filtering multiple streams of incoming info. I can’t prioritize and choose among them. So if three people are talking to me at the same time and a radio is playing the background and a TV show is on a screen, and there’s a sign on the wall full of text, I find myself trying to formulate responses to all three conversations while reading the poster, keeping track of the hockey game and combing my memory for what year that Fleetwood Mac album was released (along with worrying about my shirt tag scratching my neck, an itch on my nose and whether it’s a booger, reliving a social interaction I botched 20 years ago, etc. etc. etc.)

But once I get to an impossible-to-process number of sensory inputs (like you’d find in a pub with 10 TVs and 50 patrons and a band, etc), I somehow cope by turning inward and concentrating on a single thread. It’s like the cacophony around loses cohesion and just becomes a sort of static that I can ignore in favour of whatever I want to accomplish. It was how I used to reach “the zone”—what people are now calling the “flow state”. I really enjoyed this give and take between my introversion and my artistic need for public. I just didn’t know it.

The comfort and success of my social world, though, is different.

One would think that over half a lifetime a person would accumulate more and more friends and acquaintances, but I’ve found this to be the opposite. When I was young, I was a rah-rah, let’s all be pals, kind of guy. If we’d had a pint together, we were “friends”.

But as I’ve aged, a couple things have happened: 1) Social media was invented and I’ve learned more about these people than I should have, and 2) I’ve been burned enough times to stop touching the damn stove. So, I’ve drastically narrowed down the attention I spend on others so that only those I am most invested in remain. I’ve left behind people who are toxic and tried to reallocate the energy I was wasting on them back into friendships that sustain me. This has been good for me, and I’ve loved the way its strengthened and changed those relationships, but what I had ignored was the power of being alone in public. Anonymity in a crowd.

It’s harder to get that here, in many ways—everyone knows everyone, especially in the arts, as I said. But on the other hand, that distance that exists naturally between myself and others has started to become its own strength. Besides getting better at setting boundaries on who gets to be my friend, I am also figuring out how to accept that other people have these boundaries as well.

Anyway, what does this ramble amount to? I didn’t start it with an end in mind, as you can tell.

Maybe it’s a stream-of-jabber admission, of sorts, that while I have always thought of myself as an introvert and a bit of a loner, there’s a part of me that needs other people. In public I need them for their physical presence, and privately I need them for their non-physical presence. And maybe also I wrote this to clarify for myself that while some of those people you meet in either situation will be great and lovely, some will be jerks—or not even that—just people burdened with their own trauma and flaws, who haven’t yet figured out how to keep themselves from injuring others. Where ever your find someone who has sharp edges, you usually find someone who’s been cut, you know? That said, an explanation for why someone is a jerk is not an excuse for them being so—and after years of trying, I’ve come to the conclusion it’s okay to let go investments in some people and focus that attention instead on those who make life better—be it people you know socially, from work, or even family (that’s a post for another day).

I wonder how many people made it this far into the piece. Meh. I did.