• 27 Dec, 2025 *

Every time I think of Perfect Days I feel a pain in my heart. The level of loneliness in that movie is something I feel like I really understand, and I feel like that’s how I’m going to end up. But at the same time, it doesn’t really feel changeable. And I feel like this is what my dad also feels, and I wonder if part of this is just East Asian cultural nonsense where there’s some barrier to talking about your feelings so if you’re single it’s just so easy to fall into loneliness. Like moments of connection are still there but it’s fleeting, also, and you know that in your last breaths you’re not going to be around someone.

Of course, it’s silly to claim that any one experience is "culture." My mom talks to her family and other people in her Buddhist temple or whatever but she’s still so painfully lonely but in a stupid, chaotic way that has no dignity to it. If I have to feel painfully emotionally unfulfilled in half of all of my waking moments, I would much rather do it in a way that doesn’t trouble other people going about their lives.

There’s just also the experience of living with failure and the scars from a terrible family and the raw pain even years later, even when you’re happy with what you’re doing in your day-to-day life — as long as you can forget your past and focus in the present; but it’s always there, like a shadow.

I come from lonely people. And I don’t think I will make choices to be someone completely different, someone who is not lonely. When I think about who on this planet I know that can ease that loneliness for me, only one person really comes to mind, and that person is not accessible to me. It’s so weird. I want to be seen so desperately, to talk and have my thoughts and theorizing about the world and about stories be taken seriously and responded to in kind, but I may not ever get to live a life with this person. And this person is also someone who probably can’t even understand this self-imposed loneliness as they’re always a problem-solver who believes in their capacity to change.

I also don’t really like that it feels like there’s only one person out there that presents a "solution" for me. It’s like a failure of the imagination. I think this is where people fall into the trap of believing in stuff like soulmates and what not. I don’t like longing for someone(’s thoughts), and I can recall multiple times where our communication has broken down and made me extremely frustrated in a way that doesn’t happen with other people. But then again, other people are much more similar to me and are less interested in the topics I’m interested in.

And what if this person is gone one day? Do I just roll over and give into my self-imposed loneliness? How do people go about finding friends that they feel like they can talk to extremely deeply, who value the same things as them? Talking about my feelings is no problem (evidently as someone who blogs way too much), but finding someone who knows what to say back is extremely rare. Bouncing ideas off of someone for creative ideas to theories about oppression and whatnot is even rarer. I don’t want to say it’s a "miracle" to find someone who is sufficiently similar yet different in order to feel like you’re gaining something new without falling into a basic communication void of "Oh, well you actually just don’t see people like me as people so this is going nowhere," but it’s definitely not a common experience.

The problem is probably that a lot of this requires searching, and that searching is work that has no guarantees. In that case, it seems easier to just throw my feelings onto the page and feel sorry for myself for like 3 hours before getting distracted with something else. That’s certainly why my dad isn’t looking. I just feel like I have too many things I need to fix about myself before I can really go searching for deeper human connection. I have to achieve certain things so that potential friends don’t just feel like they have to Take Care of me.

And what if the future I want comes to pass and it turns out that the ratio of "annoying me" to "giving me emotional fulfillment" is just too high? And then I feel kind of dumb ever thinking that it could be the "answer"? Heavy Quotation Marks there because even if I get to have a life with them we would definitely both need to be talking to other people too or I would definitely lose my mind. But someone I could come home to and immediately be like, "Can I get your thoughts on XYZ," in a way that isn’t met with, "Oh but that’s just because you’re always just like QWOP," which is basically what talking to my sister about my feelings feels like.

I guess people really don’t know, and this is why half of all marriages don’t work out or whatever. Human brains really cannot conceive of a "forever," and they certainly can’t conceive of "10 years from now," because Life Happens and all relationships have a breaking point of stress. Do I really have to face the threat of feeling like, "Well, I sure was stupid to hope for anything better?" The unknown is so annoying. But I’m already kicking myself for past friendships I’ve made. Maybe understanding that it happens and that’s part of the process is the best thing I can do.

Being who I am, I’m probably always going to feel stupid at times and lonely at other times and regret in constant waves. I don’t know how other people with better upbringings function, but I guess my life is just one of recurring grief over what I couldn’t have. And of course, there’s all the other stuff, too. The stuff that makes you happy. The plants in his little apartment and the work of the process of cleaning (or art, in my case), that makes things just more livable and even happy in the moment.

It kind of sucks, though. It’s so hard to hold both the grief and the happiness together and not give way to the former.

But supposedly, if you do it correctly, then dying alone on your deathbed isn’t the final word in the complexity of your existence.

#moping