Lately, I’ve been feeling more and more alone, and I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on why. I know that part of it has to do with the vast majority of my friends getting married and starting families, while I can barely get a date. It seems the relationship train left the station a while ago, and I was late and missed it. Dang. And while I’m ok with being single, being one of the few single people I know is starting to take its toll. Everyone has their own family now. They don’t need my company anymore, and they certainly don’t have time for it. My circle of friends has slowly disintegrated until I can barely tell its there. And on those rare occasions when someone does manage to have some time to spend with me, I’m the one who has to put in all of the effort. After all, I’m the single one!
Another part of it is that I have been working in a field other than architecture for the last 7 months (and was out of work for 3 months before that). Architecture tends to be a very communal field. People work together on projects, and you rarely see real cubicles or offices in architecture firms, with most office layouts being very open. My new job is nothing like that. I sit in my enclosed cubicle for hours at a stretch without talking to anyone. I can literally go all day without having a conversation with another person. And then I go to the gym and either run (which is very unsocial, unfortunately) or climb, and when I climb, I talk my partner’s ear off because it’s the first human interaction I’ve had in some time. And then I go home, where my roommate is often not home or is busy working on projects in her room. So I’ve started watching TV, mainly because it makes me feel like I have some sort of community, even though the other people in the community are only characters, and they don’t even know I exist. But at least I’m a bit less lonely.
Something my sister said to me recently made me want to cry. She basically said that I was lucky to be single, because I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. If only life were that simple! Yes, I might have a bit more freedom with my schedule, but I always have to do everything alone. Which often means I don’t get to do it at all, because it’s just not safe or efficient to do it alone (such as backpacking. I don't feel comfortable heading into the wilderness by myself). Also, it means that I HAVE to do all of the necessary things. I don’t have anyone else to pick up the slack. For example, I wasn’t feeling good yesterday. When I lay down, I felt better, but I was starving. But when I got up to make something, I felt so sick that I just wanted to lie down again. Since I’m single and have no one to help me out, I spent the day lying down and starving. It was one of the worse days I’ve had lately. And then I woke up this morning to a mess in my kitchen because there was no one else to clean it up. That's just not the way to start my week. Hopefully by tomorrow I'll be feeling a bit better about all of this. And today I'm feeling much better physically, so at least that's a start.