People are not interchangeable, part 2

Occasionally I find myself wishing that I were “talking to more people,” or “had more friends,” or was “in a community.” All of these desires are no doubt exacerbated by the fact that we are yet in a pandemic, and our most epic social hangs are four-person affairs with masks on, trying to be as far away from each other as possible inside.

The solution to these yearnings is probably not to just start calling up random phone contacts or begin calling the people whose comments I read on YouTube my friends, though that may be entertaining in its own right. I don’t like talking to every person. I like talking to some people. I don’t want to be in any community, I want to be in specific types of community.

Who I live with or near, who I sleep with, who I spend my time with — these are all people that are certainly not interchangeable. They are specific. They are special, an intentional web of connections spun through a mixture of chance and effort. And certainly other people’s webs may look similar to mine, may even have similar personalities or dynamics. But they may not. And also, those webs aren’t mine. I am not that spider. I am a different kind of spider.

I am a spider person.