Collective Dissonance

I try to keep my distance from society, maintaining a buffer that allows me to observe and interact as little as possible. It allows me to watch people and how they interact with their environments while keeping a comfortable distance so I can stay to myself and just watch. It’s all part of my noted introversion and general misanthropy.  It’s not that I don’t like people. I love to watch them, trying to figure out why they do what they do, how they operate. That said, I just don’t trust people and stay away in most situations and choose mainly not to interact.

I fear I’m integrating myself too far into society. I’ve started going out drinking with friends, doing things with other people, and trying to enjoy being around other people. I’ve started acting like a normal twenty-something college kid.

That terrifies me.

I often feel like I’m walking through a forest, and I’ve just met a bear. This bear isn’t like most bears. He doesn’t sell toilet paper nor does he have any interest in eating me. Instead, he befriends me. We keep walking through the forest, enjoying ourselves as friends typically would, and all of the sudden, the bear snaps and mauls me to death. That is how I feel every time I’m around other people. I feel like I constantly have to be aware and constantly have to be looking behind me, or I won’t make it out alive.

That is any social situation for me in a nut shell, the constant awareness that I’m not in control and that the bear could snap at any minute and take me out with it. It doesn’t mean I completely fear social situations, I don’t. I dislike them, but I don’t fear them. I don’t necessarily avoid social situations either, but I’ll never be that person who walks up to an innocent bystander minding their own business to shoot the shit. People like that terrify me, and I won’t be one of those people. Consequently, I wear headphones and sunglasses so that people can’t make eye contact, and won’t try to talk to me.

I’m destined to be a wallflower. I know this, and it is what I want to be. A normal, sane person wouldn’t jump into a crocodile infested swamp and hang out waiting to be eaten, and I won’t do the same. That is why it terrifies me to integrate too far into society, to start behaving like the perception of a normal specimen. I feel like when I start going out with people and building relationships that I’m betraying myself and setting myself up for the inevitable backlash that follows such an event.

I fear that I might eventually lose sight of who I am, and my purpose of observing to learn. I fear that one day I’ll get sucked in, and I’ll just be the normal person with friends, 2.5 kids, a house in the suburbs and a wife that is fucking the gardener while I fuck my secretary. Not in the same room, of course. That would be trashy.

I think overall, I fear being everyone else. When I look at everyone else, and their lives, all I see is misery. Misery in relationships, financial misery, misery at work, and sweet misery for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t want to get sucked into that life that everyone else seems to have where their soul is completely drained from them and they become hollow shells of what they were.

Everyone I know is getting married, having kids, getting divorced, hanging on a thread to things they yearn for but can never have, and I don’t want to be that person. I want to actually enjoy life, because I spent so long hating it. I’m relatively happy with my place in life right now, and I realize how delicate a balance that is. I know that it is a razor’s edge between here and crying myself to sleep every night and medicating myself into an oblivion of twisted reality in order to forget about why I feel like this. I’ve been both places, and I know one of those places is a place I don’t want to be again, and I know how to get to one of those places, and I fear it is the road I am on right now.

Is it irrational? Absolutely. Then again, I’m a very irrational person, so it all works out.