“There’s something else.”
I’m staring at my therapist’s grainy face on the laptop screen, my own bathed in the pink glow of my bedroom lamp. She opens her mouth slightly, as if I’m about to impart something serious.
I sigh. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
I pause, trying to find the right words. “I don’t like hanging out with loads of people. I don’t like hanging out with… more than two, maybe three at a time.” Another pause. “When sober, at least.”
My therapist’s face doesn’t move. And then she shrugs. “So don’t hang out with more than two or three people.”
“But, birthdays. Weddings. Important events. I can’t avoid them.”
“Well, yeah. But aside from that.”
“But, also. Don’t you think it’s a bit weird? It’s a good thing to have a big friend group, right? Isn’t that, like, a measure of success? I know people who had 15 bridesmaids. And they’re going on all these hen parties and holidays and everything’s done together in this big, amorphous… mass!” I spit out that last word like it’s dirty.
“But are you lonely?”
“No, I have friends. I just like seeing them separately, or in tight little groups.”
Something flits across my therapist’s face. I realise that I am describing what could be called a non-issue. Hardly a crisis. I’m reminded of one of the cast members on The Real Housewives of Rhode Island who started crying at a dinner table because she had no real problems.
“Daisy. The thing about all of this,”—I’m assuming she means life—“is that for the most part, we get to choose what we do.”
There’s no time to meditate on this, our 50 minutes are up. I slam the laptop shut, feeling vaguely dissatisfied. It wasn’t that what she was saying wasn’t correct. It was that she didn’t quite answer my question, or get to the crux of what I was worried about. That I’m weird for not wanting a big friend group. That the anxiety I feel in such scenarios—a combination of feeling trapped, self-conscious and generally unlike myself; a sensation I have felt since I was a child—suggests I have failed at what is supposed to come most naturally: being human. Being normal. Being likeable.
As with most people, the notion that everyone can and should have a big friend group was etched into my cultural consciousness early. Sex and The City. Friends. Girls. People meet these friends while at school, or university, or early on in their working life, and they stick with them. I have had friend groups that are just like this. But I’ve never been able to sustain the constant connectedness that acts as their glue over a long period of time. “Well, we’re going to the party without you!” I can still remember one friend huffing down the phone, when I skipped out on yet another event. Another time: downing two G&Ts before an eight-person dinner, just so I could get through it. Another time: the feeling of horror that bloomed in my gut when I received a WhatsApp asking if I wanted to join a big group trip to an absolutely gorgeous tumbledown villa in southern Italy. Why did I react this way, I wondered? Not for the first time.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
