Loneliness

Why would drugs be considered a valid treatment for loneliness? I'm not an authority on getting over loneliness, but I would have though having people around who genuinely care would be a good solution to being lonely.

Yes, that's a favourite. 

Yes I feel lonely too, usually in the evenings, after a days work as well as low moods which come and go like clouds, still I know these feelings pass but I don't like them.  In the past I have had moderate depression and am hoping that depression does not come back, that was eighteen years before the diagnosis.  I am now slowly coming off the latest anti-depressants after being on paroxotine for many years, I hated Sertraline, gave me stomach ache, I would rather face loneliness.

I have seen him on a few videos recently. He is good at deflecting questions, like a politician. I've heard he would like to run for President. He is rich enough. One of the 1 percent. 

He comes across as very Data-like, which does seem ASD. But the way he has betrayed the trust and sold out so many of the users of FB does come across as psychopathic Not so mush Data as Lore.. The morals of what is bannable on FB and what is not, have always seemed questionable too. The slightest hint of a bare *** and we get prudish approbation, for example, whilst seemingly it is OK to post footage of animals being tortured to death. I know, I complained about the latter and nothing was done and there have been some truly sickening videos there. I wonder if that reflects the site's owner's tastes somehow?

I use Facebook, but I have never published details of birthday, schools attended, etc. 

Do you like Coffee and Cigarettes? It was a pretty different concept!

I said he was a psychopath just due to certain things I had noticed. The person then started saying "Yes, but he has Aspergers and they aren't good at reading emotions". I then said that not reading emotions and the reasons for that (which I got in to some detail about), were different to not having remorse, egotistical tendencies, e.t.c.. They just couldn't understand it. They told me "I've done research on Autism" like they were a scientist. Their basis for it was a few 5 minute YouTube videos and reading things "on the internet". They literally could not understand that the social problems people with ASD have are not akin to psychopathy in anyway. I got a bit frustrated after a while and said "You have so little a grasp of it, you've ignored the fact he could have both".

Lol, that was the first thing that came into my head. I could have saved myself 20 minutes of my life! It did bother me a bit though because that person was quite rational usually and it made me think of the way ASD people are generalised.

Can you tell me what the link is with Zuckerberg and autism and psychopathy? Really curious....

I’ve met some lovely people here, thank you... and it helps a great deal! 

Oh i see. That sounds really tiring. I can understand why music would be useful in that process. I hope you feel you can share all your emotions here with us.

I carry a lot of other peoples emotional and practical needs and wants so “compassion fatigue” and many years of not being heard mean a lot on internalising - the full gamet of emotions - joy not shared, happiness not shared, hurt not shared etc

Would you say you are quite an emotional sort of person?

Boris Johnson sounds like he is on the spectrum. The sociopathic one. 

I listen to music BECAUSE of the emotion it creates.  It helps at the end of the day.  a self induced Cathartic experience -

"Catharsis (from Greek κάθαρσις katharsis meaning "purification" or "cleansing") is the purification and purgation of emotions—particularly pity and fear—through art or any extreme change in emotion that results in renewal and restoration.

Yes my family was aspiring too.

Actually one person I knew had something very interesting to say about trust. She thought it was best to trust most people you know a little, in the areas where they are most likely to be trusted and not trusted. I think there was some sense in that

Well said.  As for the class thing, I agree.  Money, power, the right connections, etc.  Look at the case with Boris Johnson, when he set fire to some restaurant toilets as a 'jolly jape' in his Bullingdon Club days at Oxford.  Wheels turned behind the scenes and the matter was dropped, and he was allowed to continue with his studies.  Anyone else, not so connected, would have gone to prison for arson, criminal damage, public endangerment, etc.  Been marked for life.

I'm working class.  My family is working class.  Unfortunately, some of them have a social climbing agenda, and have essentially turned their backs on their roots.  I wish they could see how they don't quite fit with aping their 'betters'.  Their class status is all demonstrated through property and possessions.  Nothing else.  The 'nouveau riche'. 

As for me - I've long felt psychologically displaced.  I was born in a vibrant working class neighbourhood in London.  It's now Millionaires Row.  The same with the Devon market town where I spent my teens.  Hardly a native voice is heard there now.  It's more like Richmond-upon-Thames.  It feels like there's nowhere left to go here anymore.  I'll never understand concepts like 'national pride'.  I just happen to have been born here.  I don't really know the place now.  I'd like to go somewhere where the social ethos is different.  More inclusive.  At least then, even if I'm alone, I'll feel I'm in a congenial environment.

Agree, too, about toxic people.  I find it very hard to differentiate people sometimes.  I never really trust anyone.  It's probably the safest way.  The only person I ever implicitly trusted - it went without question - was my mother.  Now... I trust my cat!  She never lets me down!

Yes.  I was so pleased when the writer/director Martin McDonagh (whose 'Two Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri' did so well at the Baftas and Oscars) pulled a grimace when asked for his opinion on Robert McKee's 'Story' - the supposed film industry Bible.  I've always hated that book.  As he said, it's fine if you want to write formulaic stuff like super hero movies.  He went on about how much he struggled with studio heads and producers in the making of his earlier 'In Bruges' - the changes they wanted.  The bits they wanted left out, or put in.  These people are largely idiots, it seems.  And they get it wrong all the time.  Look how they got it wrong with the Harry Potter books.  'You won't make much money out of this', she was told.  Hm.

Jim Jarmusch is another artist I greatly admire.  I haven't liked all of his stuff.  But he sticks with an independent vision.  Only 'Ghost Dog' and 'Broken Flowers' have enjoyed some mainstream success.  But that doesn't interest him.  And he always gets the funding to make his movies, and the great stars to appear in them, because there's a big enough minority of people who love them.  I don't think he's ever recouped production costs at the box office.  But thank goodness that doesn't stop him from making his films.

'Withnail and I' is another prime example of a film everyone expected to fail - and it did, at first.  But we'd be so much the poorer if that one had never made it through.

I refuse to 'adjust' to suit the 'demands' of the market - whatever they are.  I've stopped reading a lot of contemporary fiction because you can nearly always read what's gone on behind the scenes. The formulas and tropes.  I'll write what I want to write, not what someone else wants me to write.  If that means I never get anywhere, then so be it.

I used to lament loneliness massively. There can be all sorts of reasons for it. At least three people important to me pinpointed one factor - we did not fit in because of a class thing. You can be talented, you can be educated up to degree level, but if your family is essentially working class, you will not really fit into a more middle-class culture. Certainly in one town that was very bourgeois, I was never happy there and always felt a bit pitied and patronised - that is what all these nice people do when they are pleased with themselves - then I moved to a city with a different culture - it was much easier to feel more in a level with other people there. 

There was one girl at my uni who was full of 'helpful' advice, telling me if I wanted to fit in I should be more conventional and look at least approximately in the direction of the person talking to me. 

Nowadays I am inclined to think there are worse things than loneliness - drinking from poison wells. I mean toxic people. Mind games, full of ego and unstated agendas. I will not have anyone look down on and pity me now for seemingly being on the outside, I have standards too!

I think loneliness is not so much being alone, it can be about the need to find the right kind of people 

'Helpful' comments can be just plain irritating and definitely not helpful. The first art course I attended, my work was slated for being decorative. I still have doubts over my work because of that. 

I saw nothing wrong with the piece you showed us here, with your petty tyrant teacher. That ought to hook anyone. Have to say, after reviewing, and occasionally proof reading too, a few manuscripts, that criticism can be helpful too. I suppose it depends on how it is done and if it is intended to package you into some kind of commercially viable mould.....forget it. If the two Blade runner films had followed that advice, the film world would be all the poorer for it.

nexus9 said:

In the art world here, things have opened up as many creatives have got sick of the closed doors here. I find it is a question of checking to see what kind of agendas other people may have and what sort of hidden snobberies and projections. Apart from the summer, most of the time the day job leaves me too exhausted to want to meet new people much anyway. 

It's a bit like I feel now about the publishing world.  I'm heartily sick of the way you have to shape your work to fit in with what they want - which is basically, of course, to do with 'marketability'.  My book about my seven months caring for mum in her final illness is, in my view, very much a story of our times.  The dilemmas people face over what to do when loved-ones can no longer look after themselves - and the lack of suitable alternatives, with social care pushed into a corner.  But one 'editorial assistant' said to me 'What's the angle with this?  Was your mother famous for something?  Are there dramatic twists and turns in the narrative to keep the reader hooked for 150k words?'  This is the kind of fatuous nonsense you have to deal with.  As you say, too - agendas.  Always something, wherever you go.  Cliques, etc.  I enjoy my day job, but only inasmuch as I'm working with autistic people.  When they arrive in the mornings, my lights go on.  When they go home, so do I.  I get along with the other staff.  But I'm not part of their circle, and don't want to be.  Once I'm home, I only go out for exercise or shopping. 

I mainly work from home these days, which is better by far than being subcontracted to a company to work. But there is still a school where I work and that can be isolating. It might be because of the difference in language and culture though, alongside the fact that I have a part-time status that means I don't have to stay on the premises and attend meetings. That latter is no loss because I loathe meetings!

I wish things could have been different regarding my own school days, especially at secondary school. 

My Dad died a couple of years ago too and my mother is now in a home, after a stroke that seemed to bring on full-on dementia overnight. It did not take long after that for other family members to continue the tradition of casting me in the role of black sheep and blaming me for everything though. 

It can certainly be hard to find people on some kind of wavelength, though there are one or two. I am still in touch with some of the old artist friends from a community we had in the UK. Others are dead though, one jumped off a train way back, another died soon after my Dad after drinking herself to death. 

In the art world here, things have opened up as many creatives have got sick of the closed doors here. I find it is a question of checking to see what kind of agendas other people may have and what sort of hidden snobberies and projections. Apart from the summer, most of the time the day job leaves me too exhausted to want to meet new people much anyway.