Socially Isolated

This is something that I have wanted to write for a long time now. I suppose it is something that even once this article is concluded I will still want to write about. A part of me wants to preface everything to come with some sort of warning or preemptive apology, but in all honesty I can't come up with one that feels sufficient. Let's just say that I love where I live now and the people that I am surrounded by, and that none of this is indicative of any shortcomings on their part.

I wasn't there when my daughter was born. Months and months of waiting for a new passport, on top of her being born via an emergency c-section far earlier than expected meant that by the time I had actually finished the drive from Houston to Montreal I would have missed her first six weeks of life at least. Getting turned around at the border the first time I tried to cross it didn't help either, and by the time I had actually arrived to hold her for the first time there were only hours until we could take her home from the hospital.

Angela and I hadn't known each other for very long before we found out she was pregnant. It happened the second time we met in person, but being in a relationship with someone on the other end of the continent tends to make that difficult. Even with the distance, we made things work, and following her home from the hospital felt eerily normal not matter the fact that I was in a new city in a new country with road signs written in a language that I only vaguely understood. Adapting is something I've always excelled at, so becoming an immigrant and a father in the same day was far less daunting than it maybe should have been. It all seemed to come quite naturally. Finding where I fit in in my new home with my new family wasn't difficult at all. Finding any place to fit in outside of them did not. It still hasn't, really.

I had worked in the service industry for well over a decade before quitting to start my own semi-successful business ventures. I had plenty of friends from high school and through the industry, not to mention all of the ones I'd made at the comic book shop playing Magic: the Gathering or HeroClix. Moving so far away meant starting over with only some of that, as I certainly wasn't going back to bartending anytime soon. Then again, with a newborn baby at home, I wasn't going out anywhere either. Not enough to really socialize at least. That was fine, because I had so many other things to worry about. Putting aside any effort spent making new friends in favor of doting on my daughter was a no brainer. My wife's mom group friends had husbands I could eventually get to know. There were some other Magic players at her church that I could become acquainted with. Maybe I could find someone at the local game store who also smoked pot and had similar enough views that we could hang out every once in a while. In the era of Trump it had become exceptionally easy for me to cut ties with people who embraced the hate mongering, but being in Canada made the concern of running into those types of people not so pressing. It felt like I could settle into my new life as a father and then go meet people as a person.

And then there was a global pandemic.

By the time I had really gotten a footing in my new surroundings, and also by the time my daughter had recovered from her gut wrenching heart surgery, there was a God damn pandemic happening. Now I didn't have any chance to meet people. We went on lock down aside from scheduled trips to the hospital and essential errands. We started wiping down every package that came into our home with Lysol wipes. We spent long nights talking about what this meant for my immigration status. Thankfully we could cover our bills without either of us really working. I'd already sold off the majority of my possessions, including my Magic collection, so the fact that paper tournaments were effectively extinct for the foreseeable future meant selling the rest of them didn't hurt as much as it otherwise would have. Considering the prices of cards now... Let's save all of that for when I want to feel bad about myself for other reasons. The point is that we were as okay as we could be given the circumstances, and we were treating the pandemic like the very real threat that it still is as of writing this.

By this point I was more intimately familiar with the concept of social isolation than anyone reasonably should be. I can vividly recall the feeling of not just being a foreigner, but being alone as a foreigner washing over me in public for the first time. About six months into the pandemic I started missing that dreaded sensation. You might think that when COVID hit it would have become easier to schedule virtual hangouts with people over Zoom or Facebook Messenger, yet it only made things worse for me. Already busy and complicated lives only became more complicated, and the friends that I so rarely if ever spoke to after so much time apart had to adjust their daily lives to something that I had already been living in for a year. Social media quickly went from a reminder of how much I was missing out on to how much longer it would be before I could even attempt to start building friendships in real life again. Sure, I had met my wife on social media, but that was an incredibly rare occurrence in my life. I'm not the kind of person who makes finds truly meaningful relationships online. My friend list on Facebook is long, I vaguely know a bunch of shit posters, there are a bunch of people who click the memes I post. Generally speaking, loose acquaintances at best.

So now I'm in full blown "nobody to talk to" mode, back to working like crazy in between bouts of depression and mania that stay well contained so as to not effect my wife or daughter's lives in any negative ways. I have people to talk to. I have people I love who I talk to. I have my wife, my sister, my mom, a couple of close friends who actually do stay in touch with me in my DMs, but I don't have anyone to sit with and smoke a joint. I don't have anyone to make inside jokes with. I don't have friends in the way that normal people do and should. I don't know when that's going to change.

I've been vaccinated once at this point, and things are starting to open back up in Montreal, though that doesn't mean my situation is getting much better. Now I have a whole new set of responsibilities that I have accrued during the pandemic including a new job. The fact that things are getting "back to normal" just means that I've got more daunting tasks ahead of me regarding what I need to do as a parent, especially with a child with Down Syndrome. Shit is rough, yo, and I still don't believe that I can afford myself the opportunity to go meet people when there is so much else to devote attention to. Then again, I've never been the "go meet people" type. The friendships I've built over the years have been made organically. Without bars to drink at or card shops to sling spells in, I'm not sure where I would even do that right now.

At the time of writing this it has been over eight hundred days since I have seen a friend of my own in person. Currently one of them is expected to move about a half hour walk away from me in a September, and I can't wait for them to be here. Maybe we can make new friends together. Maybe by then going to a bar or concert will be a thing that we can do confidently and without any grave concerns. Either way, I know I'll have a friend to visit in person again, and I can't express how grateful I am for that.

I'm not sure what the moral of this story is. If I had to guess, I'd say that it's something about staying grounded even when you're alone and staying strong through difficult times to see better ones come back again. Or it's something about how pandemics fucking suck or how you should probably learn the language before moving to another country if you have the time. Remember to check your sperm levels post-vasectomy just in case? There doesn't need to be a moral. You can take away from this whatever you would like to. Just be kind to yourself, even when you feel like you don't have any friends, and be kind to others so that you can make some new ones.

John Dodge felt like doing some rambling on the internet, so he wrote this thing that you just read. If you liked it, you can check out some of his other work here on Vocal, or over at CBR.com where he writes full time about what happens in your favorite comic books. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter. There's a button on this page somewhere that's shaped like a heart, and another one next to it that lets you send John Dodge money. You get to choose which button you want to click, but you have to choose one. Not choosing to click one of those two buttons is a crime in several countries, and for the sake of keeping you on your toes I will not elaborate on which countries those are.