I have an etching on my wall by Tracey Emin. I bought it for £250 after my first really serious boyfriend left me when I was 21. It’s of a little bird on a branch and at the bottom it says ‘Sometimes I feel lonely, but that’s okay.’
I never care what people think about me.
Yeah right! Of course I do really, everyone does right? Or let’s rephrase that – it’s when you care what everyone thinks about you that you’re in trouble. Most people care what the people they care about, think. And that’s totally understandable.
I’m at home alone on a Saturday night – oh god, what will people think? I should be out partying, surely that’s what EVERYONE else my age is doing tonight? Then one day I realised something. It’s OKAY if I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing or what I think I should be doing. I’m much happier when I’m doing my own thing.
The happiest, quirkiest people I know often do their own thing, odd things, which is sometimes nothing, or not the thing they should be doing. See what I’m saying?
It took me a long time to get to this realisation, I’ve put a lot of work into learning to respect and like myself but sometimes I still forget it.
Oh god this blog is bloody boring and self-absorbed.
Ok what now? Well, I want to tell you something I find very difficult to admit or say out loud.
The thing is, what I really want to tell you is – that I’ve never felt that I have many friends or that they are REALLY there for me if ever I need them to be. I’ve always been someone who has formed strong friendships with individuals, and never really had a big group of friends who I can hang out with. That’s what I would like/need. The few close friends I have all have groups of friends who I’m not part of so I always end up being the friend they go out to dinner with or have round for dinner. Going round and round the M25 looking for the right exit and ending up at the end of a long traffic jam. Added to that, most of my few close friends have moved abroad/got married and had babies.
Living in a big city like London, I guess it takes a big effort to keep up a social life.
There was an article in The Times a couple of years ago which focused on a couple of late 20 year olds who both said that unless they had made a big effort to arrange to see friends at least a week in advance they could easily spend a whole weekend at home alone, not talking to anyone. How awful is that? Is that what modern life in the city is really like now? If I die, how long until someone notices? I reckon it would be at least a week for me.
Sometimes I just need to adjust my hermit crab/social butterfly settings – a bit of socialising and then it’s back to the hermit crab. I’ll arrange something tomorrow for next week. Everyone’s probably busy though.
So, I am at home again on a Saturday night, watching CSI, tweeting and blogging. And then someone posts this link on Twitter and suddenly it all seems okay again.
