The Sound of Laughter In The Next Room

Have you ever felt you belong with a group? I see one of the Group and feel better, relax a little, or perhaps start to anticipate something good. I see a look of welcome, pleased-to-see-you on their face. We exchange some greeting, catch-phrase, and start to go somewhere neither of us need to name, or else wait for the Others and pass time with some chat that means something to us. That's what it's like for children, teenagers, undergraduates. For adults, maybe something similar, maybe with overtones of favors done and received as well. Mothers see the neighbour who baby-sits the kids on Wednesday evening, and whose children she takes on the school run Tuesdays and Fridays. Tradesmen see the guy they call on when a day's plumbing is needed, and who passed them a couple of day's plastering last month.

This is not a feeling I have. I must have had it once, to know what I'm missing. Or maybe I have just deduced it from what I've read and heard and seen of other people's lives. I could not even tell you what kind of people would give me that feeling, and I'm not at all sure who would feel that way about me. I have for years thought of myself as invisible - but the truth is that it's other people who are invisible to me. I'm pretty sure no-one talks about me in the pub after work, but I know I don't talk about them except in the abstract. The other people are invisible to me because we have nothing in common. How do I know that? Don't be silly. You know who your tribe are just by looking at them. Maybe you react to the a part of the mix of pheromones or whatever else chemicals we all give off as signals to each other.

I feel the hurt from this most when I meet someone who my instincts - those messed-up co-dependently-trained untrustworthy instincts - tell me I should get involved with. When I don't, through cowardice or good sense or just because I know she's already got a partner, that hurts. It feels like denying myself and it hurts. I've heard people talking about "sexual anorexia" or "emotional anorexia", but it's not the same thing. I understand anorexics feel a buzz when they deny themselves food. (I felt that buzz once myself in early recovery on my way to Phone Service one Saturday morning - and stopped off for breakfast at the Earl's Court branch of Balans immediately.) I don't feel a buzz when I deny myself people, I feel sadness.

You would think that by now I would have "got over it" and "moved on". However, no-one adapts to that - though there comes a time when you have to have the manners to stop going on about it in public. Conversely, it would be nice if the public would stop throwing people across my path and reminding me of it. Is this why most old people don't go out? Because they don't want to be reminded of their age and irrelevance? I used to go to a Thursday evening boxing class: between it and the train timetable, I wasn't back home until 21:00 and the traditional physical jerks that emphasise explosive strength don't suit me. But I kept with it for quite a few weeks. Many of the others did at least one if not two other classes a week and they chatted before the start and shared a handful of in-jokes. Not much, but just enough to suddenly make me feel that once again I was on the outside. And that upset me, so suddenly I found the logistics inconvenient and stopped going. I noticed that every now and then some new people would try the class out and not come back. Was it because they thought "no, this is an in-crowd thing and I want some hard-core exercise without a reminder that I'm not part of a little group" and didn't get upset with themselves for not feeling part of the group? They felt, in other words, that it wasn't the place for a "group"? Which sounds pretty "well-adjusted".

The exclusive gyms, exercise classes, schools and even pubs (The Blind Beggar anyone?) are exclusive because what they really offer is networking: the guarantee to their members that all the other people there will be reasonably congenial and possibly useful company. No time-wasters, tyre-kickers, glommers, celeb-spotters and other parasites, misfits and plain ordinary people.

A group is formed round some common experience or activity that its members want to share. This is why commuters aren't a group: they don't want to be there. It's why office workers often aren't a group: the nature of their work by and large isolates them in themselves (compare a bunch of analysts with their heads stuck in their computers with a bunch of guys in a foundry, who have to co-operate or they will be seriously injured by hot metal).

At some stage in our lives - I'm guessing it's well before eighteen - we need an experience of what being part of a group is like. We need to see and feel what it is like to exchange favours, to help and be helped, to trust and be trusted. Then we can see the world around us as somewhere we have a place in, that can be trusted, can be helpful to us and to which we can be helpful. These are not experiences that can be "had later", but lessons that need to be learned when we are still forming ourselves. Otherwise we make the adaption to a world that isn't helpful and can't be trusted and become, in the words of the song "cold, alone, just a person on my own". That was my experience.

I and others like me might have adapted like that, but it doesn't mean the urge, need or instinct to want to belong dies. That's still there. It's what lies behind our sense that we're incomplete and it's what causes the sudden bolt of loneliness when we are somewhere we would like to belong and know we arrived too late. It's why the sound of laughter in the next room is so tantalising and cruel.