Alone in a Full House

I have a wife I love, kids who want my attention constantly, a studio I built, and a house that is almost never quiet.

I also feel alone most days.

I have started this post a few times and deleted it, because writing it down feels ungrateful. I know how it sounds. I have the things I wanted. But I would rather say it than keep pretending the two things cancel each other out.

Being around people is not the same as being known

There are people in my house all day. Somebody is always talking to me. The loneliness is more specific than that.

My wife does ask how I am doing, and she means it. But it is not a daily thing, and I do not think it should be. It is not her job to notice that I have gone quiet.

I ask my wife about her day, though not every day. I ask the kids what happened at school. I ask my team what is blocking them. I have had a lot of practice.

That is not anyone’s fault. If you are consistently fine, people stop checking. Being the stable one is a role I took on because it was useful. Now it is just what I am.

The part I like the least

There is another half of this that has nothing to do with anyone else.

When I am in a slump, I push my family away. Not on purpose. One of the kids comes in wanting to show me something, and I give them the shortest answer that will end the conversation. My daughter holds up a drawing. I look at it for two seconds and say it is great without really seeing it. My wife asks if I am alright, and I say I am fine because explaining it feels like more work than carrying it.

She asks. I am the one who closes the door.

So they leave me alone, which is what I spent the whole evening signaling that I wanted. Then the house goes quiet and I feel worse than I did before. I do not think they know that is what is happening. They just know dad is a little short today.

I spend a day being unavailable and then sit there at the end of it feeling unseen, as if those were unrelated events.

I know what that is. It is the old idea of what a man is supposed to be. Hold it in, handle it yourself. I do not even believe it and I still do it.

It has gotten better, though. I used to hold things in and leave them there. Now I tell my wife, even if it takes a few hours. The gap between “I am fine” and the real answer used to be permanent. Now it is an evening.

Work stopped coming with people

I have never worked in an office, so I cannot say I miss one. My work history is a custodial job, a job at a golf course, and then programming from a room in my house.

The custodial job was on the after-hours shift at a hospital: an empty building and a list of rooms. The golf course was the opposite, the first job where being around people came with the work. None of it was deep; that was sort of the point. It was steady, low-level contact with other people, whether I had the energy for it or not.

Then it went back the other way, and I chose that. Working from home is much closer to the custodial job. This is the work I wanted, and I would not go back. I had been on both sides, so I knew exactly what I was giving up and did it anyway.

Running GhostJam narrowed it further. When you run the company, a lot of what is on your mind is not something you can share with the people who work for you. So I answer questions instead of asking them. It is the same pattern as at home, except here it is my actual job.

Every so often, I talk with a group of people who run their own studios, most of them further along than we are. It is the only room where I am not the most responsible person. But those conversations are occasional, not daily or weekly. A good conversation once in a while with someone who gets it is not the same as having someone around.

The friends I pulled away from

Some of this is older, and it is on me too.

I got into a relationship and started drifting from my friends. Nobody fell out with anybody. I just stopped being the one who reached out. Then we got married, and there was even less loose time lying around to spend on anyone outside the house. It is one of the most ordinary things that happens to people in their twenties.

What I did not expect is that it would come back around. I talk to Jack, one of my best friends, almost every day now. I also talk to a few friends in the area several times a week. That is more real contact than I had for most of my twenties.

Which is where I keep getting stuck. I am not friendless. I have people, I talk to them, and I still feel exactly the way I described at the top of this post.

I assumed this was a math problem. Not enough people, not enough contact. The contact came back and the feeling stayed.

What I am not saying

I am not unhappy with my life. I would choose it again. My wife is the person I tell things to, even when it takes me a few hours to get there. She is the one who told me she liked the silver hairs I had only just started hating. My friends show up. They answer. Nobody in this story is failing me.

I do not think anything is wrong with me either. Plenty of men my age feel this way, and almost none of us say it out loud because it sounds like complaining from someone with nothing to complain about.

So I am saying it out loud. Having a full life and feeling alone inside it are not opposites. They fit together fine, which is the part I did not expect.

I have not fixed it. But now I know something I did not before I wrote it down: some of the quiet is mine. The people are already here. On a bad day, I am the one who goes missing.

until next time