The Unrealised Promise of Mingling at Meetups

It's Sunday morning. I'm mentally and physically drained. There's not a single cell in my system that has even a nano unit of energy. This is mostly the result of simply trying too hard and doing too much. This fluctuates with periods of doing virtually nothing other than just waiting for time to evaporate and bring me closer to the future (I have analytical thoughts on this which I will share in another post), a state that is equally draining but perhaps in different ways. Friday was the last of four weeks on Talk for Health, a peer counselling course that I've been doing once a week. By the end of the afternoon my brain was rendered virtually inoperative. There was something mentally exhausting about the course. I don't think it was even primarily the subject matter but rather the delivery and interaction; there was a tiring slowness and weightiness about it which expended considerable psychological effort. When I got home I slumped on my sofa in a zombie-like fashion from which I did not recover.

Over the past few months, when I've felt frustrated or depressed I'd been resorting to telephoning a helpline, such as Samaritans. Recently, however, I noticed that I'd developed a dependency on this which I felt was an unhealthy place to be as essentially it became a de facto addiction. A couple of weeks ago I made a conscious decision not to make any more such calls, recognising that reliance-by-default was neither sustainable nor conducive to mental wellbeing. So on Friday the confused emotional hopscotch I was experiencing would have to play out on its own. I was aiming to be at least refreshed enough by Saturday morning to function again on some level as I'd diarised a coffee afternoon with a group through Meetup. Poor weather is one other factor that has a major impact on whether I even go out but it was actually a sunny December morning, with seven degrees Celsius and virtually no contributory wind-chill factor or rain forecast.

There was a pro-Palestinian demonstration in central London resulting in curtailment of bus journeys. Having to walk a few stops as a result meant I arrived to find most people from the meetup already in the coffee shop. The host pulled up a chair for me which felt very welcoming. I counted twelve in the group; I am always counting and re-counting everything! Even whilst sitting with the group I periodically counted everyone many times over. I'd been doing the same in the Talk for Health group and I always do this in Talk & Listen as well. I can't stop counting things; even as I lie in bed I count through things or repeat numbers to myself; on buses I keep counting the number of passengers, the number of bags, mobile phones and all manner of paraphernalia. Anyway, I digress, and not for the first or last time! Whilst everyone present was engaged in conversation it was with their immediate neighbours. This applied to me as well and did not change for the entire two hours that we were there! I would have liked to talk to everyone in the group but nobody budged; there was simply no mingling. 

The whole point of these meetups is to meet people and not to get stuck with the same one or two people for the entire duration. In the unfortunate scenario, as often happens, that you end up sitting next to someone that you very quickly discover you have nothing in common with, or find very hard work, you're lumbered! There is no get-out-of-jail-card option other than just leaving which in itself would feel awkward. I don't feel I have the confidence to do that but just staying can become a real test of endurance. It just so happened that it wasn't so bad yesterday although there was an element of having to make an effort to keep some conversation going where really I would rather not have had to. On leaving I knew that my need for human connection on some semi-meaningful level at least had not been met and I realised I felt a real desperation in making some such connection. I quickly scrolled through events on the Meetup app and came across a social night meetup which boiled down to having a drink and dinner at Wetherspoons. The number eight bus would get me there.

The knock on effects of the earlier demonstration meant buses were not running normally and, again, I arrived to find that everyone was already half way through their meals; in fact I noticed the lady at the end of the table was just forking the last chip from her plate! It was a bigger group than the one at the earlier meetup; I counted twenty-two, several times, as I stood at the foot of the row of tables like a prized yucca plant. There wasn't a single spare chair. Everyone seemed busy with their food and the conversations they each seemed to be engaged in with their immediate neighbours or the person opposite them to notice me, not even the host. I announced that I was leaving, wishing everyone a pleasant evening, although my social anxiety may have prevented my voice of reaching the required number of decibels required for human auditory detection. 

As I started to make my way towards the exit a woman exclaimed I should bring a chair and sit at the corner of the table. Just as I was contemplating this possibility someone else arrived; this was confirmed as I counted everyone again and arrived at a figure of twenty-three. Their arrival resulted in a revised table arrangement where the end table was split off from the rest, a bit like the small part of a rocket that detaches itself and falls away from the rest of it after launch, leaving the main rocket to fly on. I ended up sitting at the small separate table with another chap and the new woman! After a few moments she got up and somehow found a way to join the main rocket, leaving me with the chap at the fuel booster that had fallen away. The conversation required more effort as it was now one-to-one action. I'd ordered fish and chips, the seed of choice having been planted by the woman and her forking of her last chip earlier. When a meetup involves having a meal the movement restrictions are greater than when just having a coffee; one really is lumbered. Having said that, everyone remained fixed in position long after they'd finished eating. Mingling is simply not a feature of some of these meetups.   

After some time a few people got up to leave and I glided through space towards the top end of the main rocket. I perched near a cluster of three, relieved that I'd been able to move. Physically moving in space induces a shift in thought and emotional state. I've noticed if I am particularly burdened by a continual stream of negative thought I can sometimes reduce its impact or shift it entirely simply by getting up and walking about for a few moments. Sometimes even just turning my head to look the other way can be enough to achieve this kind of result. The cluster of three was quite friendly and easy to talk to but, alas, they had to leave too. There was a couple to my left but the woman got up to leave and I started to chat to the man that remained. It became apparent very quickly that there was no rapport whatsoever here. I found this individual very difficult and he had quite an aggressive way about him.

Later on I reflected on why I stay in the company of people whose behaviour makes me feel uncomfortable or with whom I really don't want to engage, but make real efforts to do so anyway. I had sat with this person for at least half an hour but there wasn't a single moment where I hadn't wanted to part company. Ordinarily one might ask why I just didn't get up and leave. The reality is I was trapped in a prison in my own mind which made it impossible. I remember that I kept thinking that I really didn't want to sit with this individual for a single moment longer and that I kept trying to think of how to make an exit. The problem was that my attempts to formulate a plan to facilitate this were sabotaged by intrusive thoughts of dropping something if I were to get up and leave, and then not being able to check if I had dropped something. I was also concerned about leaving something behind on the table and was additionally preoccupied by the bottle of ketchup whose position I found I was continually fine-tuning.

Regular readers of this blog (which we have already established don't exist because of Google's refusal to index it) will be aware that I suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and, in times of anxiety, and indeed in times of relative calm, it kicks in, hijacking my thoughts and dictating my behaviours. I needed to get away from someone, within whose presence I felt very uneasy, and the extreme anxiety that was building up launched an ongoing internal full scale attack of obsessive-compulsive disorder from which there was no escape. The thoughts of dropping something if I were to get up to try and leave and the bottle of ketchup dragged me along a path away from the one that would allow me to break away from the psychological turmoil I was experiencing. The guy said he had to go, got up, put his coat on and, as he walked through the doorway I could feel the veins in my whole body surge with a coolness of rushing mountain spring water. If Van Gogh had created a painting to represent the look on my face at that point in time it would probably have ended up being little more than a blank canvas; everything had lifted away and the prison gates were wide open exposing a blank emptiness inside.

Authenticity has become a key value for me this year. My authentic self would have said to my fellow comrade that it didn't find the conversation engaging, would have acknowledged the lack of rapport, would have expressed the discomfort and, having opened up to the vulnerability of relaying such complete and unequivocal honesty, would have felt no guilt in severing the connection. At the same time, I can't help but wonder that sometimes we may not want to express such authenticity. We do not owe anything in particular other than a level of courteousness to a transient stranger through a fleeting encounter; authenticity is the goal to formulate and maintain positive relationships with people that you want to include in your life. The ketchup man situation really just needed me to feel confident enough to be assertive in saying goodbye. My OCD, and all the other anxieties I experienced, are indicators of just how much my confidence is lacking.

The Metaphysics of Social Interaction

I was just glancing at my calendar of the past four weeks or so. There's not much in it but there are one or two social entries per week on average which sum up the extent of my social life. At the start of the year I made a conscientious decision to make efforts to step outside of my comfort zone of a hermit's cocoon and attempt to connect with fellow human beings. For the average person this may seem a relatively trivial and insignificant step, but for someone with social anxiety, deep-rooted insecurities and other mental health challenges it can seem like a bridge too far. Nevertheless, I've persevered and continue to try and indulge in a couple of social events pretty much weekly. This is in an effort to satisfy a real need for human connection, something which has always been difficult and elusive due to personal awkwardness, anxiety and uncertainty. These are qualities which I've always been afflicted with but which I am trying to address at this stage of my life through means of personal growth and pushing some personal boundaries towards experiences that may challenge my personality complexes. My theory is, that if I can gain new experiences in trying to connect with others, then I can learn from this and develop into a more balanced individual that people might actually want to spend time with. The practice is yielding mixed results for which I shall provide some examples from the aforementioned diary!

Kicking off with the start of the month, the first entry in my diary was a lecture on the philosophy of medicine! I know, random, but it was the indication of a drinks reception that was to follow that clinched the deal! I won't go into the details of the lecture now, because I don't remember any of it, apart from the fact that a medical outcome is predicated by factors which, if altered, would not necessarily revert the outcome to an expected value, as all factors are variables whose contributory effects cannot be predicted with certainty. Basically, everything is down to a best guess: your medical treatment might work as expected; or it might not. Anyway, I digress. Following on from an hour's worth of enlightenment, accompanied throughout by pretty pictures and formulas with lots of squiggly symbols projected onto a big screen, I found myself at the greatly anticipated drinks reception. I scooped up the glass of red wine that appeared the most full from those on the table and proceeded to look around as people gathered. There was a throb of voices filling the room and I realised that people were quickly mingling and talking whilst I was still finding myself alone with a steady and unfaltering build up of social anxiety to keep me company.

At some point I realised I was on my second glass of red wine and still hadn't interacted with anyone. There was a woman standing very close by. Before I knew it, "Good evening! How did you find the lecture?" I exclaimed, trying to look and sound natural, concealing my anxiety as best as I could. It seemed to work. Yeap, I'm pretty sure I got away with it! We got a conversation going about philosophy and medicine. I imparted the extent of my knowledge about the subject in sixty seconds, which was about outcomes not being predictable with certainty because of factors which are random variables, or something along those lines, and she reciprocated in kind with her knowledge on the subject based on the Ph.D. she'd just completed on the subject. Not long after, she parted company with, "I just need to go and talk to my friend!". I put that down to a success, relatively speaking. With a somewhat newfound confidence, of sorts, no doubt fuelled by one point seven five glasses of red wine, and counting, I scanned the room in some sort of three hundred and sixty degree fashion. On spotting a group with what I perceived as open body language I rocked right up and said "Hi. How is everyone?". Silence, cursory glances from two of the four in the group, the other two stepping back from me, and a continuing silence. Yes, the tumbleweed effect. Then the four continuing their deliberations as if I was not present, visible or audible. 

That, for me, was enough of a confidence-shattering knockback to elicit a beeline for the exit. It doesn't take much to shatter an already fragile state; fragility does dot harbour resilience. I feel content that I am at least stepping out into territory that remains a personal challenge, never knowing what perils may be lurking in the nooks and crannies of the complex social fabric of human connectedness. I knew the woman didn't necessarily need to go and talk to her friend; the politeness of etiquette masks the true meaning, which translates to "I'm now bored with you and uninterested in what you have to say, so I am going to go and find someone else to talk to with whom I may feel a little bit more excited about". There is no problem, of course, with wanting to do exactly that, but the result of getting such reactions continually serves as a reinforcement of social inadequacy and degraded self-image. At least though, she adhered to the accepted rules of social grace. Contrast this with the tumbleweed encounter, the rebuttal of which, with the complete absence of social etiquette, left me frazzled to the point of requiring immediate departure from the proceedings of the evening.

On leaving, my mind entered a deep and complex analytical phase that is customary for someone with heavily introspective inclinations and a continual compulsion to seek insight and understanding. I went through, in my mind, the sequence of events at the gathering, from how I stood, how I looked, what I said, how I said it, how people were affected by me, how they reacted to me, what they said, how they said it, how they moved, where they looked and what they did and did not do. Every piece of information went through an internal interrogation system through the filter of my own experience, conscious, unconscious and outworldly. If the factors that dictated events during the evening had been different, how would possible outcomes have been altered, and could any of these have been predicted with any level of certainty? Or is the entirity of life just one big metaphysical melting pot of variables in a continual state of flux? 

PS. The Ph.D. woman might be able to offer some clues, unless she's still talking to "her friend", in which case she might be too intoxicated to be able to do so by now; she too was on the wine.

The Existential Threat Posed By Social Events

Sometimes being surrounded by everyone is the loneliest, because you’ll realise you have no one to turn to.

~ Soraya, Astrologer & Reiki Practitioner

If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

~ Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper, 2004

People think I’m odd, so I know how it feels to be different, and I know how lonely that can be.

~ Beauty and the Beast, Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve

I'd not ventured beyond my front door for three days. I needed some real-life human contact. Over the past few months, at times like these, I have been going online to look for something to do to satisfy such needs. I don't have friends I can just call up to meet up with or even just to have a chat with. Occasionally, I might ring my bank's call centre pretending I want to check a transaction just to have some brief conversation! I might also ring an emotional support helpline if I am particularly troubled. I spent quite a long time on the telephone seeking some respite from Samaritans on Saturday night. To actually meet people, though, I've been using websites such as Meetup, Eventbrite and Facebook. And so it was that yesterday I found myself scrolling through "events" on Meetup and Eventbrite to find somewhere to go where I might encounter human beings who I could just talk to. I found an event which was described as a social evening to meet new people with whom to walk around Shoreditch looking at street art. This sounded like just what I needed!

My mood needed a pre-event shift somehow or another. I'd been cooped up alone in a sea of depression for three days and needed to move up a few notches on the sociability scale. I would need to present myself as a friendly, likeable and approachable character whilst sticking to my values of authenticity, the desire to just "be the real me". Despite an inner fragility I arrived at the scene in pleasant mood and, to the best of my knowledge, welcoming body language with energy to mingle and interact. This was the whole point of even turning up to this "social evening to meet new people"! There was quite a crowd already gathered when I arrived. I spotted someone on his own just looking at his mobile. I thought he might appreciate some company and so I didn't hesitate in just going up to him and saying hello. He looked up at me momentarily and, without speaking, just resumed looking at his mobile. I immediately felt my mood taking a shift in the wrong direction of the scale. This had such an effect on me that it set a scene of foreboding for the rest of the evening.

We all stood around waiting to get started on the walk. I managed to somehow pretend to myself that I felt absolutely fine and unfazed and that the evening would facilitate the anticipated social interactions. A quick hand wave from the organiser signalled we were now on the move. We set off on a journey that was to unfold over the next couple of hours with all the emotional complexities arising from social anxiety that it would entail. I quickly realised that I was not even noticing the surroundings as we walked along, a column of people moving along the streets of east London, with me lost in my own world somewhere within the final third of the procession. I looked up and around. It seemed everyone was in pairs or small groups of three or four and, amongst all these fellow walkers, I found that I was on my own, with just my own thoughts and insecurities for company. This wasn't the point of joining a group activity. I had to talk to someone! 

Attempting to shift gear, mentally and physically, I made an effort to engage with some of those around me. I tried various permutations of conversation starter that sprung to mind, which ranged from a simple "hello", to comments about art, the streets of Shoreditch or what attracted people to the event. Response was short and superficial, if even there was a response at all. Some people seemed reluctant to venture out from within their mini social bubble or were too deep in their contemplation of art, life or the universe. Or maybe there were deficiencies in my social skills; maybe my vibe was being perceived as decidedly off kilter. At times of despair in social situations, as soon as I am faced with the notion that I have nothing left to lose, I resort to nuclear options within my social armoury. There would be no more lame "hellos" or "that's a nice shade of blue on that bit of graffiti" to get the party started.  

I made a beeline towards a woman who appeared to have momentarily separated from the pack. "Do you think Schrodinger's cat poses an existential threat to humanity?". Unfazed by her look of bewilderment I turned to a guy next to me and exclaimed that I'd had some taramosalata and pitta bread that afternoon and asked whether he'd had anything to eat before coming out that evening. I might as well have been speaking in Mandarin. I gate-crashed a party of four and introduced the concept that each electron has a twin spinning in the opposite direction billions of light years away. Nope, that didn't get much of a reaction either. I've noticed in many social situations when several "normal" attempts to start some sort of conversation fail I seem to resort to avant-garde all-or-nothing tactics. I think I do this in the belief that nothing works for me anyway. By the time I get to this turning point I think I've given up on connecting with anyone, so I think I act in a way more for my own personal amusement than anything else. It's a temporary respite from the underlying pain of rejection.  

The walk came to an end. I hadn't paid any attention to any street art, apart from some graffiti where I noticed a pleasing hue of blue, which I pointed out to someone only to be met with indifference at the time. The group started to disband, saying their goodbyes and heading off into the night in different directions whilst I looked on. I was a little bit lost, both in my thoughts and my location, and stood motionless looking around expecting answers to appear before me. Suddenly, it started to rain; I had no umbrella. The trouble with this situation, as a myopic bespectacled individual, is that everything just starts to feel really shit. So there I was, by now alone, somewhere in the dark, wet expanse of this part of the city. I hadn't even come close to any human connections; the "social" event had been an unmitigated disaster. I was too emotionally numb to discern whether I was alive or dead inside. I was Schrodinger's cat; isolated, lost, and soaked in an existential paradox. 

I just needed to find my way home; I still had some taramosalata left in the fridge. And that could be followed with tea and crumpet with Morello cherry jam. Maybe there was some point to life after all, albeit consolatory.