Emily Paige Ballou - Wordgathering

Women Alone

It is often observed in the autistic community, and supported by research at this point, that many autistic and introverted women, far from being uncaring or incapable of friendship, tend towards maintaining a few close friendships rather than a larger network of casual friends. I’ve even heard it said that we choose “quality over quantity,” and that this is just as valid a model of friendship as belonging to the extended social networks that other women do.

Which, of course, it is.

But lately I’ve wondered whether this state is actually just as good for our wellbeing as having a larger, more interconnected social circle, and begun to suspect that it isn’t.

During the pandemic it was thrown into high relief to me that even after 15 years in New York City, I did not have a local, in-person, friend group here. By early summer of 2020, when the initial panic had subsided and transmission rates were falling, I’d go for walks in Central Park and see huge, rambling picnics of ten or twenty or more people, casual outdoor gatherings that could last most of the day. There were many lonely, frightening moments in the course of that year, but I quite possibly never felt lonelier than when I saw those and wondered “Where in the world is this for me?”

Both of my roommates had left the city and I was staying in our apartment alone. The theater industry had shut down overnight. A summer trip I’d planned to see friends on the West Coast was indefinitely postponed. On one hand, having such an unprecedented amount of time to myself was a gift in certain ways

On the other, I started realizing how much I’d mistaken having such an intensely social career for having a coherent community.

And I didn’t.

I have a circle of friends from college and we’re still incredibly important to each other—and we’re scattered from one end of the country to the other.

Working in theater means that with every new production I gain a whole community, which functions in familiar ways, where people work closely together under intense circumstances—and then lose it again twelve weeks later.

Of course I had friends in the city, but virtually none who lived in my neighborhood, who could just come out to the park with me without getting on public transit. Or they had obligations to disabled or immunocompromised children or partners, so that even when families started forming social bubbles, it was never with me.

I started to realize how much of my default social life was online, and I didn’t want that to be the case.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve started deliberately putting more effort into maintaining in-person friendships again. I have phone dates with friends who live far away. I’ve spent more time with a few close friends than I had cumulatively over the past fifteen.

And it still feels like I just have no center of gravity. I’ve never felt like I had anything resembling a found family or a chosen family. (And this is something that leaves connection with the LGBTQIA community particularly fraught.)

I haven’t even tried to celebrate my birthday in years. The best thing that’s likely to happen is that I’m working on my birthday. Someone will bring in cupcakes. People will come out for a drink after the show. Describing spending their birthday with family in an interview with British Vogue, actor Bella Ramsey said “I don’t have a friend group. I never have.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen this dilemma described in print before.

“Their friends are scattered to the winds, in cities all over the world—a byproduct of growing up on film sets and befriending other actors and crew members,” writes interviewer Zing Tsjeng.

I read about groups of female friends, single or widowed in their later years, who decide to buy or build homes close together to form a retirement community of their own, and I can’t fathom having a group of friends that committed to each other, and also to me.

Almost none of the people who love me or know me best even know each other.

As I’ve reestablished more human connections, one of the challenges I’ve noted is that, with people I haven’t seen in a while, to even catch them up to my life at the moment takes a lot of time. And I have to do it over and over with every individual friend, which means I’m not ultimately having the depth of relationship or conversation I want.

Recently I wound up spending a lot of time with an old friend again after we ran into each other at a party, and I realized that seeing the same person, who I neither worked nor lived with, three times in a week, was the point at which we got to start talking about something other than what the pandemic had done to us or what our most recent gig had done to us.

And also that that hadn’t happened to me since college.

Also, when you don’t have a group that hangs together by default, in which other people are making the plans or hosting get-togethers at least some of the time, that means it’s me doing the reaching out, the planning, the scheduling, with every single person in my life, and it takes a high energy toll. I feel like I’m trying to schedule friendships in two-hour increments, and it is hard to feel known over a long period of time that way. It’s hard to feel like you have anyone to be at rest with.

Particularly at this time, politically, when so much of the baseline advice for what to do and how to stay safe is to “find your community,” to be with other people, it’s hard not to feel ineffective and adrift when community never quite sticks to you in the same way.

I’ve written before about some of the less-than-ideal experiences I’ve had in trying to access healthcare as a single woman, as an autistic person, and as an arts worker. The latter in particular means that virtually all of my local friends are also working jobs with long hours, erratic schedules, and are frequently out of town for extended periods of time. If I needed more than someone to come with me or take me home from an appointment, if I were going to need help for a substantial period of time, who other than me would be organizing that? When all of the people closest to me live in different cities and mostly don’t know each other?

I want to be clear that this is not a deficiency on the part of any of my individual friendships. It’s not that any one person isn’t doing enough, or that I don’t treasure all of my friends wildly.

But I’ve grown skeptical that it doesn’t have an impact on our wellbeing, on our sense of security in the world, to just not know that we have a coherent support network that will hold itself up when it counts.

Or to know that it won’t.

To know we have people who love us everywhere and yet belong nowhere.

About the Author

Emily Paige Ballou is a Midwesterner, the co-editor of Sincerely, Your Autistic Child from Beacon Press, serves on the editorial board of OUGHT: The Journal of Autistic Culture, and has work previously published in the Champagne Room and Rhizomag’s Emerging Writers section. She lives and works primarily in NYC as an Off-Broadway stage manager of new plays and new musicals.