Sinan Writes This

Social Limbo

I don’t think my social life has ever fully recovered from leaving university.

I was in a long course. Add on top of that some external medical problems which kind of knocked me out for a good year and it’s safe to say that I was chained to uni life for a while. I made a lot of friends there, friends I spent a long time with. I was also blessed with my best friends from school being local enough to stay in constant touch with them. It was a really good time, minus the being ill part.

All those uni friends have gone - the nature of that course means they spread across the country, across the globe. And they’re also incredibly busy. Staying in touch is hard enough, let alone seeing each other. All my school friends are too far away or too busy too now to spare the time. I kinda got left alone in a social limbo because of all those external problems.

I then got into part-time work, but I could never make longstanding friends there. Just not my type of people. I’ve now made loads of friends through this writing-about-games malarkey, ones I talk with regularly, ones I’ve met a few times too. But because it’s all over the Internet and not in person, it can be a little tough. Take Joe, for example, my Big Red Potion co-host. I would consider him a good friend now, we’ve talked plenty about each others lives’ and helped each other through tough times. But we’ve not even shaken hands. It’s tough. I think going to E3 this year would’ve really helped. A shame that I could not.

My girlfriend and I have also had to deal with the things going on in her life - she has had and continues to have much tougher medical issues to deal with than I ever did - and that can often make it impossible to make the time to catch up with old friends or meet up with new ones. So I still feel like I’m in a social limbo. I love my girlfriend, I love spending time with her, but I do miss my friends, old and new.

I wonder if this has something to do with why I want to get away, to have an adventure abroad. My life is making me a little claustrophobic right now. I am well aware a sojourn in Italy will solve nothing… but it couldn’t hurt, right? The problem is working out how to make this work, on all kinds of levels.