Lowered Expectations

I lived in an unbroken home, my parents are still married, never separated, no big dramas. Typical 50s sexual politics. It's great. Except that my parents kept me very close. I never really had the chance (nor necessarily the desire) to be a bad kid or get in trouble. I just spent my time with my family and with a group of very close and well-chosen friends. Up until I was 18, I never even had a reason to want to change that.

My parents never really respected my privacy. They would come into my room without knocking, go through my things when I was out, and when they discovered something they didn't like, their invasive behavior could not defend me against their proof of my deviance. So I learned simply to live without the privacy, instead just staying in my room so that I got as much private time as I could have. I adopted the hobbies of a prisoner, almost, learning to occupy myself with books, writing, and music. I didn't go out because it was often less relaxing to be in public or with friends than in my room.

What I basically learned over the first 18 years in my parents' home was the ability to store all my tension in my shoulders and just expect less of the world beyond the bedroom door. It didn't leave me entirely unhappy.

But then my sister moved away to go to law school, and that web of comfort which my lowered expectations had created began to disappear. After my first solo visit to her new place in San Jose, I became fully aware of just how big the world could be, and how much freedom was out there for the taking. I wondered for the first time whether my self-imposed imprisonment in my bedroom was really helping or harming my mental health.

My decision over that first year as an only child was to get out as well. Being that only child meant that my parents babied me even more and my small shreds of privacy also started to evaporate. I needed to experience a life where there wasn't a constant threat of disappointment or intrusion, where the sound of a door opening wasn't the signal of my world crumbling or evaporating.

The Wrong Choices

Unfortunately, I made many bad choices in my quest for that utopia beyond the bedroom doors. My first mistake being the fact that I decided to try to play the independent young man when in fact I didn't have the capability nor the ambition to fully realize it.

My piddly part-time job, enjoyable as it was, did not pay the bills of a solo flyer. Being a student, and wanting to stay the course, meant a full-time job was out of the question. As soon as I finally moved out, and into a sin-city apartment in a bad neighborhood, I realized just how hard it was going to be.

In response, I got a roommate. I assumed that having a roommate wouldn't be as bad as having parents, since a roommate should have neither the ability nor the grounds to exercise the type of judgments and intrusions parents often do. But they do come with a wide range of proportional problems. Problems which are not conducive to the improved mental health of a poor family escapee.

Over the 7 months of my first time away from Mom and Dad, I let my roommates ruin me. The first roommate was a coworker who was incredibly bad with money, and over his 2-month tenure in my home managed to lighten my starving-student self of nearly $1,000.00. Abusing and stealing my possessions, and having less respect for my privacy than my parents, he was simply an annoying hick who became impossible to live with after the first month.

He left, and Laura replaced him. I thought living with a chick would be better, considering 1) I was gay (though I never actually told her), 2) they tend to be cleaner, and 3) they tend to want more privacy, and thus she should have been more likely to respect mine. I was pretty wrong on all counts with Laura. She had clinical depression, which made her difficult to communicate with. She was a pack rat of the messy variety and had a hard time devolving community spaces in the apartment to community control. She was very controlling also of my free time, asking me to be around when she was scared of being alone, and keeping tabs on my every move. She was also bad with money, which rubbed off on her close associates, myself most emphatically included.

After a little more than 5 months living with Laura, I couldn't take it anymore. I was more stressed than I'd been at my parents' most intrusive of times, and I was deeply in debt. Most students know the debt monster well, but I had set out in college planning to come out in the black, and I wasn't going to give that up without getting something substantial in return. Living with an unlivable roommate wasn't worth it. I left and I crawled back home to Mom and Dad, admitting defeat and screaming for some sort of sane stability. They were good parents and provided it, and didn't pull the "I told you so" card too many times.

Yeah, I'm a Hermit

I decided as I completed my undergraduate years that it would be best if I did not attempt to leave home again until I could both live alone and live independently. I pretty much accomplished that. My sister bought a house around the time I turned 22, which came with a cute studio apartment over its detached garage. For a reasonable charge, I could have what amounted to something better than an apartment, and by that time I had graduated and started working full time.

The new apartment was perfect. For the first time in my life I was in total control of my space. I painted the walls gray and no longer had to see the disapproval in my parents eyes when seeing the black sheets and black window dressings and black clothes and black furniture. I could do what I wanted when I wanted with whom I wanted. I could crank the music or leave it low. I didn't have a sudden adrenaline lurch every time the door opened, since it only opened when I was opening it myself. I didn't really become a hedonist, as many do when escaping a very controlled environment. Rather, I merely became comfortable that I was now in charge of the controls, and in fact became even more domestic - definitely more than the average person my age.

I became a hermit, and I am still one. To the core of my being. I need that control over my free time; that ability to come home and unwind and not have to worry about whether I'm in someone's way or whether the music I want to blast will interrupt someone else's own unwinding. Yes, I'm selfish to the extreme: when I'm home, I don't want to have to take into consideration the input of any other person. My home is my sanctuary. My home is where I go to escape the outside world, and the only place over which I feel in complete control. If I lost any of that, I could almost guarantee that my already perilously high blood pressure would become hazardous. My job and family life already give me enough stress - I need that one place where neither are able to penetrate when I don't want them to. I can turn off the phone, turn up the music and pretend that the world ends at my walls.

It is with this premise that I have concluded that I could never again live with anyone. I have lived with family. It almost killed me. I have lived with roommates. It almost ruined me. I almost can't go more than 48 hours or so in the constant companionship of anyone else without beginning to feel an intense level of stress and almost depression. If I can't have at least a few hours every day in which I am in total control over my environment, I feel I'll go mad.

And yet, after two years of comfortable solitude in my first real home, I have begun to casually question this. It's only for short moments, or when writing about it in journals or essays, but the fact that I'm pondering it I feel is significant. I don't at all feel prepared to give it up entirely. Rather, the ponderings are a sidebar to the particular goings-on in my life, when something else significant is happening and I wonder how long this current setup will last.

What the Future Holds

My ambivalence is based on several factors: first, the current setup can't last forever, mainly because it depends upon the duration of my sister's stay in her home. When she decides to move, I must find a new home myself. But that doesn't mean I can't still live alone.

Second, I don't really know how much longer I can stay at the job I currently hold. Numerous promising futures beckon me: teaching, law school, international espionage - but the ties that bind continue to keep me here: family, money, friends, local culture. As well as the integrated fact that I love my home, and have put a lot of energy into it - to the same degree of a full-fledged home owner, in fact.

Third, what if I were to meet someone that I felt so strongly for that I was willing to trade my solitude for greater shares of their time? I pose this question entirely rhetorically, even though it does bear an analogy with my life at present. But would I be able to assure myself that I was comfortable with such a trade? Or would I discover all too quickly - as I did when I chose the roommates over the parents - that it was a huge and horrible mistake? And would I be able to live through such a mistake without destroying myself or the person with whom I set up house?

Ultimately, my assumption for now is that a combination of all three of these factors will have to pull themselves together. Does that mean that I won't leave until Sis moves? Not necessarily. Does it mean I'm anxious to move on in my career? Sort of. Does it mean I'll be popping the cohabitation question to someone anytime before either of the first two happen?

That's what I set out to determine when I started this essay, and I still haven't at all figured out what the answer could possibly be. So for now, I guess I can just let the ideas brew. Wait for something to nudge me along. Ultimately, I'm not in a rush - the contrary, in fact. I guess I'm just a little unsettled that I'm even contemplating it at all...

. . .