Posse

Every so often, I get to thinking that I need a new social circle - or maybe that I just need a coherent social circle to begin with. I find that none of my friends really have my social pattern; they don't get that burst of going out energy at 9PM. Those who do go out are often bar people; I'll go out to a bar, but I only enjoy it when I'm with a group of people I already know and really like talking to. But I'm more of a person who likes to go out dancing, or to a movie; or whose favorite destination is just another friend's home where we can chill out and have some food and drink and watch movies or play games or do whatever. I guess this goes back to my years-long hankering for a "posse": that group of people you just roll with, who you can always call when you feel like being with other people. And after almost 14 years of being in the Boston area, I find that my only posse is still my family in Northern Virginia - 500+ miles away - and it's a little hard to get them to come out with me over all that distance. But I know they would, if they could, and in turn I'd gladly go out with them down there.

One of my friends would say, "Just go down to the neighborhood bar and meet someone;" and while it works for her like that, I'm not that person who just goes and talks to random strangers and draws a social crowd to her. I'm that quieter person who'll get into a really good one-on-one conversation. I guess maybe that's how I end up with a more scattered group of friends, who come singly and in pairs from different parts of my life, but never coalesce into a crew, the kind of social network that you can count on for both the silly and the serious.

It's not that I don't love and appreciate my individual friends ... I just find myself so frequently falling into the spaces between them. There's not really a fabric to my social life; instead, there are threads that I'm always trying to hold on to and gather together when I need them. And while there are challenges as well as benefits to being part of a close-knit group, I miss being in that place where you've got so many people around and involved with you that it's hard to feel lonely. I miss having the list of folks I can call and know that I'll almost always get one of them on the line and get them to do something with me. I miss always knowing who my peeps are, and never doubting that they'll take care of me and I'll take care of them, even when we get pissed off at each other. I can't idealize my family - we have our good days and our really bad ones - but I don't think we ever let anyone fall off the grid. In Boston, it would be so easy for me to disappear off the social map and hardly make a stir.

And this all gets into my deeper issues about belonging and being needed. Besides my family, the only place I really seem needed is at work; it's the one place in Boston where my absence would be a huge deal. It puts a lot of pressure on me at work at times when people talk about how much the organization is identified with me personally; at the same time, it's nice to know that I'm considered that important somewhere. And not that I want the lives of my friends to collapse without me ... but I kind of want to feel like there'd be more than just a fleeting impact if I weren't there. In my family, I know that people would be devasted, and that's kept me from self-harm more than once. It's not that no one would care up here; I suppose they'd just get over it much quicker. What an odd way to measure my value, by how sad other people would be in my absence.

I keep wanting to believe that I will find or form a family and a home beyond the one I grew up in. I don't really know how that happens, and after all these years I begin to think that I lack whatever it takes to find it - faith, openness, trust, warmth, extroversion, who knows. I really don't like the DC metro area; but if I have to choose between home the place - Boston, which I love and which has been very good to me professionally - and home the people - my family, who know me really well and still love me anyway - then I'm starting to think that I've chosen the place for long enough.

It occurs to me in passing that maybe it's so hard for me to find a new people home in Boston because I cling so strongly to the existing one, currently centered around DC. I tend to reject that idea as nonsense, because I don't think my attachment to my family keeps me from forming new attachments here. But then again, perhaps I am holding on to the model of my family and not recognizing and appreciating the other ways that my support system is manifesting itself in my present location. I'm not sure I totally agree with that viewpoint either; but at any rate, I thought it important to acknowledge.