commiseration or connection? who's to say

checking out some new angles on the ways I connect to other people.

This time last year, I moved to New York. I started waitressing at a Brooklyn pizza place run by 4 Greek brothers who were definitely committing a little bit of tax fraud. The customers clocked me right away. I didn’t know anyone would earnestly ask me “you’re not from around here, are you?” Sometimes the elderly men would ask me if I wanted to be an actress because I was “doing a lot of business with my hands”.

I nannied for two teenagers who hated my outfits. I volunteered at a gay history archive where everyone was smarter than me and knew the names of more famous lesbians than I did. I stopped meditating and started regurgitating substack posts. Every night before bed, I watched a video called “classic Simpsons best moments”.

Naively, I thought I was ready to become the best version of myself. I had learned the secrets to emotional security: investing all of your energy into activity, blindly moving forward when you feel lost, and never saying no. It wasn’t working. I felt weird and nothing was happening at the pace I wanted it to.

In the hopes of learning via history, I grabbed lunch with a girl I thought would help me understand myself. She had moved to New York from Massachusetts for the first time years ago, we studied the same subject in school, and she looked like she was doing fine. She was someone who had come out on the other side.

We met at a cafe she chose. I was 15 minutes late because I was lost on the train. We chatted about the thrift shops we missed at home, the people we had in common at school, and the trains we’d take. We talked about meeting new people in the city, and how hard it could be to live there. She told me about her first year here, how she met people because they both hated New York. But then: “I realized we were only speaking to commiserate. And I don’t really do that with my friends anymore.”

Since moving here, I’ve had hundreds of parallel coffees. Family members, mutual friends, or old professors. I’d speak to anyone who shared a fragment of life with me and had answers. I wanted reassurance that my choices were correct and that I could trust the pieces of myself that worked together in tandem to create who I was in that moment. I wanted to rely on shared misery and experience to tell me who I could become.

It never occurred to me that engaging with that misery was an act of transaction. The entire time, I was begging for scraps of experience, perspective, or wisdom that nobody could really afford to offer up. Taking experience for granted, I imagined that other people could lift me out of discomfort.

For a long time, I mistook commiseration for love. Love was feeling another person’s pain in the same capacity and tenor as they had felt it. I could forgive people who didn’t show up if for fifteen minutes they listened to a story I told, nodded at the right times, or found the same things I liked funny. Friendship, in my experience, was defined by mind-meld moments where you noticed the same problems with the world around you in synchronicity.

In sharing my discomforts so freely, I also hoped I was making room for another person to feel wise, comfortable, or liberated enough to share parts of themselves.

What I am trying to tell you when I commiserate is that I have also looked at a person in a kitchen with longing. I have also been afraid, hurt, passionate, and psychotic in my feelings. What I am trying to share is that I am capable of loving, and maybe that will make you feel closer to me. Loving you could be showing you that you aren’t alone. Loving you could be giving you a place to be honest- and if the way I achieve that authenticity is through shared misery, is that so wrong?

Now and then, I’ll get a text from someone who would “love to grab coffee”. Maybe it’s because they saw me on LinkedIn and mistook a congratulatory sentence for satisfaction, or they got the wrong impression that I was a great friend to have from a friend of a friend. “Hey! Someone told me you’re in the city. We should grab coffee sometime!” Oh man.

A strange feeling…seeing the loneliness you feel so openly in an unfamiliar face. Suddenly, every time I’ve tried to initiate interaction or invite someone out feels so naked. My teenage self emerges in front of me and I can see her awkwardness so glaringly. That big jacket doesn’t make you look like the girl from Freaks and Geeks, you just look like you’re wearing something that doesn’t fit, hon!

This is why people become gift givers. It was always easier for me to imagine myself as a listener or an affirmer in relationships of any kind. Emotionally providing for someone felt simpler. All you have to do is sit and nod,. People only want someone to show them they can be messy, and I liked being a place where someone could show up in a wreck. Selfishly, it made me feel like it might be permissible continue showing up late if in exchange, I offered a listening ear about someone’s terrible relationship. If I offered my time and grace, I wouldn’t have to do the real work of offering up anything tangible.

Last night, I stayed over at my friend’s house because I locked myself out. She made up the couch like a bed with sheets and all and offered a spare key in the case I was locked out all day. In the morning, the super let me back into my apartment and I ate the cookies my roommate left behind for me.

Maybe I can make appointments to make a spare key or get a tracker. Maybe I can nail down the timing of my plans for this week so my friends don’t have to do it for me. Maybe I can find something Isabel might like at the grocery store that will be a fun surprise. Maybe I can call my mom to tell her something other than a complaint- like a story I saw on the news that I know she’ll have more to say about. Maybe I can water the plants.

I could try. Instead of taking the well for granted, I could try sloping at its walls every now and then.