Nobody's Priority
On being surrounded by people, feeling alone, and the quiet terror of sitting in silence.
I FaceTime five people in a row, and none of them pick up.
I get a text, “busy, what’s up?”
I don’t respond.
Eventually, someone calls me back, and I have nothing to say.
I spend an incredible amount of time around other people. However, I’ve recently been plagued with a deeper sense of loneliness. I usually try to avoid this topic because it feels *cringe*. A psychologist once told me,
“Why are you ashamed of feeling lonely? Loneliness is a part of the human experience. By fully experiencing it, you can meaningfully connect with other people who have experienced it.”
While this is beautiful and true, it doesn’t change the fact that I feel it's more acceptable to say “I’ve been feeling depressed/anxious/sad/manic/crazy/schizophrenic” than “lonely.” There’s a lot of advertising around the “male loneliness epidemic”, however, research shows that men and women experience loneliness at equal rates1 (classic— men taking credit for a feeling we both experience).
I don’t know why I feel so much shame around loneliness. Perhaps because when I think of a lonely person, I immediately think of not being invited to the popular girls’ sleepover party, an incel in a basement, or a pitiful widower. Or maybe it's because I have to confront the fact that my loneliness cannot be remedied quickly and is largely out of my control.
It’s not that I don’t have things to do; I spend every night performing in NYC. It’s that I crave the feeling of closeness. I think that’s why I can only get myself to do a task once on the phone with someone, which is strange. Shouldn’t talking to someone take my full attention? Do I crave split attention? Maybe it’s just that I want someone to bear witness to my existence at that moment.
I want to sit on the couch with someone– ideally a partner– in silence, knowing they won’t leave. I don’t know if this is a symptom of Stanford, the tech industry, or NYC, but I often feel I’ve been penciled in for an hour. And if someone’s not getting anything out of our hangout… gotta run! There’s no sense of passively spending time together. I always feel like I’m competing with someone’s next plan.
Most of my comedy friends are still “friends from work.” I feel nervous about overstaying my welcome, oversharing, or being like the drunk secretary at the holiday party. And I’ve realized even though I’m seeing many people, I’m not seeing MY people. My family, non-comedy friends… “civilians.” People who love me for me, and I don’t have to worry whether they’ll leave if I’m not sufficiently entertaining with witty banter. People with whom I can sit on the couch in silence.
This creates a looming sense of scarcity around my hangouts. I’m guilty of it as well: often, I agree to go to several events in one evening. If I’m being honest, I rarely want to hang out with more than three people. Anything more than that, I’m just talking to three people with a backdrop of many more.
I always feel a pressure to entertain, whether I’m around comedians or civilians. It’s as if I believe everyone’s default mode is to leave, and I have to hook them in to stay, like the first three seconds of an Instagram video. Maybe it’s because I believe the only thing I have to offer is entertainment, and if I’m not entertaining… Why would people stick around?
I am incredibly focused on my career right now. I have momentum, and I am improving at a breakneck rate. I feel confident in who I am and the decisions I am making. Yet, despite my loneliness, I’ve noticed I’ve become obsessed with saying “I don’t date comics” because “I don’t shit where I eat” (Tony Soprano). While I believe this is generally a good rule, I think I’ve been using it as a form of self-defense.
A few weeks ago, I had a crush (gasp!) on another comedian. It was incredibly dysregulating. Suddenly, I was second-guessing which shows or clubs to spend time at and what jokes to make during my performance. This made me extremely frustrated because so much was at stake. If I were to date a comic, I risk getting downgraded from “comic” to “plus one.” Meanwhile, it still feels like a guy can hook up with whoever he wants and still get credit for punchlines his situationship helped him write.
I want to make one thing clear: it’s not that I won’t date comics, I won’t casually date comics. But in an industry where we are constantly traveling, dealing with competing egos, and staying up very late at night, this admission is received as if I’ve said I’m a religious zealot that’s saving myself for marriage.
Maybe if there’s strong potential for a comic relationship to go somewhere, I’d give it a shot. But this is really how I am dating in general. I find that dating in any other way makes me feel lonelier than…just being alone.
It feels lame to admit what feels like failure in dating since I cannot control it. It’s easier to blame it on abstaining. Truthfully, I am unwilling to prioritize it over my career right now, and as a person who struggles with being all-or-nothing, it’s hard to imagine a world where I can casually date while pursuing my dreams.
I’ve lost a lot of weight since college, and with that, I’ve gained a lot of self-esteem. Before, if a man didn’t like me, I could tell myself he was superficial, fatphobic. But these days, if a man doesn’t like me, I have to confront the reality that he doesn’t like me. My personality. My core. I’ve talked about this on stage before. I understand that sometimes, it’s just not a match. But my mind wants to protect my ego and I can no longer blame men for being vain.
I don’t envy the majority of relationships I see. But ultimately, we live in a society where people pair up and become each other’s priorities. And it doesn’t feel good to be nobody’s priority. And I don’t want to be the whiny friend complaining that no one prioritizes me. You should be there for your partner or your child. I want my single friends to find love, even though I know that when they do, I will fall even farther down on the totem pole of prioritization. Humans used to live in collectives and spend time together. If this were true today, I don’t think I’d feel the intense need to pair up. But everyone’s doing it, and I don’t want to be eating a TV dinner and almost choke to death because I live alone (this happens to Liz Lemon in 30 Rock).
It doesn’t help that the internet tells me that successful, intelligent women have the hardest time dating. I do believe this is Andrew Tate propaganda designed to make women settle for less. I don’t want to complain about dating because I don’t want to sound like a scorned woman, and I believe in manifesting what you want.
If your mindset is “dating in NYC sucks”, I don’t think you will find success. Nothing’s worse than being seated next to a single woman at a wedding whose only topic of conversation is how horrible it is to date in NYC. It’s the female equivalent of a man doing stand up at an open mic talking about how no one wants to fuck him because he’s ugly. It’s not what either of them looks like that makes them undateable; it’s their personalities.
I have a friend named Sharon. She’s from Trinidad and explained to me the phenomenon of “liming”, which is “the art of doing nothing while sharing food, drink, conversation and laughter.”
I love this. And it makes me think that maybe some of my issues are societal, not personal. Sitting on the couch in silence, enjoying each other’s presence, is very hard for me because I don’t trust that the people around me are just there to hang out. Sitting in silence is incredibly intimate and uncomfortable. I can count on one hand the number of people I feel comfortable liming with, and most of them don’t live in NYC. So it’s a part of me, a desire for slowness, that is not being fed.
However, in stand-up comedy, the biggest laugh is often followed by a deep silence. It doesn’t mean the crowd is ready to leave; it means they are listening and engaged. And maybe that’s what’s scary, too. If I use fewer words, they have more weight. And it’s much easier for me, especially with this climate of constant content production, to just yap, rather than hold myself to a standard of saying fewer, more meaningful words. Maybe that’s part of what I’m searching for: someone I can lime with on a Tuesday night. No plans. Just a couch, a little silence, and the quiet relief of not needing to say anything at all.
Oh, and someone who’ll answer my FaceTimes.
P.S. Thank you to Holyn Thigpen for editing, Patricia Arnedo for being an early reader, and Sharon for teaching me the beauty of liming.
Olivia Barbulescu is a comedian & accidental NY Fashion Week alumna. She writes about stand-up, being online, and the creative process. She performs around NYC and will be in the upcoming Barcelona Fringe Festival. Learn more about her at oliviabarbulescu.com.
Olivia can be reached at hello@oliviabarbulescu.com.
How I see it is humans have some fixed/average capacity for connection in a day (where the rest of the time is spent doing other things like work, eating, working out, etc..).
We can fill that connection time with virtual connection (watching a TikTok, going on Twitter, sending a text, group chats, etc..) or we can fill it with in-person connection. The virtual connection is tempting because it tastes like connection but it’s not the real thing (like fake sugar). Decades ago our parents and grandparents only ever tasted the real thing, and some of them still have the privilege of only knowing what the real thing tastes like. I sense we’re slowly waking up to the reality that we’ve been eating the fake thing because we’ve had about a good 5-10 years of it.
One of my biggest struggles after Stanford has been how do you consistently find a group of nerds. I miss the feeling of having a constant supply of nerds and curious people to interact with. I think NYC can support this but it feels like an uphill battle.
This will be your second post I'll be reading but damn you make some of the relatable content out there.