“Make Your Name Like A Ghost”

I’ve spent the past few days exploring the cybertunnels of the subreddit r/limerence. There, folks spanning at least three generations attempt to publicly process their obsessive, unrequited feelings for other individuals. Feelings for happily married high school exes that symptomize a late-onset existentialism. Feelings for senior workplace colleagues with whom a relationship would be career suicide. Feelings for flirty best friends who like them but don’t like-them-like-them, despite having drunkenly shared a mattress with them that one time.

Some of the fixations are raw, superficial and only a couple weeks old (say, a passionate one-night stand who then ghosted); while others have deep roots and have steadfastly persisted for 15, 24, even 43 years.

Users treat the group as a sort of AA, but for ruminative unwanted attachment – all organized around the tenets of Dorothy Tennov’s 1979 book Love and Limerence, in which the pop-psych term “limerence” was coined.

Most openly identify as addicts and admit to the thought patterns traditionally associated with addicts.

Full disclosure: for a couple days there, I thought I might belong among these people. As I have written here, I am susceptible to attachments that grow to mythical proportions even when their targets are removed. My reveries self-perpetuate in isolation. They sit at a low, easily ignorable simmer – that is, until I lose access to the people that first gave rise to them, at which point they reach an insidious boil.

For those few days, writing in this group (under pseudonym and avatar, of course) served as a welcome distraction. A repetitive, self-soothing activity to replace the likewise repetitive, intrusive thoughts I was determined not to have.

On the other hand, in spite of the fact that my testimony seemed to resonate with a fair number of these people, something about the whole thing bothered me, made me feel out of place.

I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

Then, midweek, DP and I went to see Storm Thorgerson’s documentary on Syd Barrett, the legendary lost little boy of what was then THE Pink Floyd.

The Bible teaches us to love God and thy neighbor, while the British tabloids teach us that Syd Barrett was a tragic effing lunatic.

But was he?

The exceptional thing about the documentary, titled Have You Got It Yet (after a phrase Syd uttered during a particularly erratic recording session) is that it is helmed by someone who is not an outsider. Graphic design wizard Storm Thorgerson is a friend and Cambridge townie that shared flats and wayward adolescent afternoons with the people he is interviewing. Participants are not encouraged to endorse a predetermined narrative. We are treated to both adorable and alarming stories about the subject, and to widely varying perspectives on the nature of fame and obscurity, time and memory.

In fact, viewers who don’t stay till the end will miss the most potent example of this. Some interviewees mourn Syd’s unfulfilled potential, while others question if there is really anything so pathetic about his transformation from Byronic beauty to banal bloke (after all, it was the incessant demands of visibility and marketing that were killing him). Some (notably the romantically inclined David Gilmour) are wracked with an impractical sense of “What if”, while others (notably the abrasive contrarian Roger Waters) remind that we all distort memory to flatter our own egos.

By the end of the 90 minutes, the main effect all this had was to make me desire more than ever to just get the hell over myself – and to un-join r/limerence. As soon as we got home, I did. I have not looked back.

It strikes me that there is often a strange undercurrent of self-importance in the act of publicly declaring oneself an addict. A reinforcement that this is one’s unique identity. A large chunk of one’s day becomes occupied by thinking about it, atoning for it and trying to fight it. For some, especially those who are a hair’s breadth away from being destroyed by a substance, all this may be necessary. For others, such hyperfocus may make admittedly sucky but also run-of-the-mill parts of life appear bigger and more insurmountable than they actually are.

To take a quick but relevant detour, I also recently watched content creator Trash Theory’s video on the band No Doubt. As their popularity mounted in the early nineties, band relations decayed to the point of disgust, with Gwen Stefani repeatedly humiliating herself over her breakup with bandmate and seven-year relationship Tony Kanal (with whom she simultaneously had to work in close quarters). Some of the band’s biggest hits were born of this dire headspace.

I had known some of this, but I hadn’t known how severe the behavior of a heartbroken, hypersensitive young Stefani had gotten. (How bad was it, you ask? Pretty bad.) The same Stefani who had/has a staggeringly powerful, self-possessed onstage presence and has been a figurehead for scores of young women who felt underestimated and controlled.

“Sappy pathetic little me
That was the girl I used to be
You had me on my knees” 

-Gwen Stefani

In truth – so many people have sufficient reason to view themselves as suckers or sad-sacks, romantically or otherwise, in particular situations – arguably, every single one of us. Consider the popularity of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, or the old Connie Francis hit, “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool”.

And so what if we are? It happens. It is what it is.

So much of how stupid we feel in a scenario is based on how we are received by others. If our “limerence” helps us create art that is admired throughout the ages, we’ll seem less ridiculous. If we are observed rending our garments and stumbling through the streets, in that moment we are tragic. Most of us simply have wounds that we put Band-Aids on. Maybe they help us write a poem or two that a couple people will read. Maybe we still think about them far too much because there aren’t that many people we see in a day, since for some of us aging means our lives get considerably smaller. It’s common, it’s human, it’s as old as the old, fat sun.

And it’s okay. Whether we’re facing front with resolve, gazing back wistfully, or clenched and screaming inside, all we have to do is keep moving forward.

In the evening sun going down,
When the earth streams in 
in the morning,
Send a cage through the post,
Make your name like a ghost…

I'm screaming, I met you this way,
You're nice to me like ice
In the clock they sent through a washing machine”

-Syd Barrett