yearning and bitter feelings
My yearning for the outdoors, the presence of friends and making of memories with other people is about to swallow me whole. I feel like a mechanic with a wrench in my hand trying to adjust little valves to manage pressure points here and there and optimize around each latest problem.
I haven’t felt the sting of envy in a long long time and now I do. I am happy for others, but also bewildered how they do it and wondering how I can build up the same. I am glad to see their success in something I suck at, but witnessing it also hurts. I try to feel inspired as usual and focusing on learning instead of becoming bitter about it. I constantly have to stop thoughts that tell me I’m not worth it and I should stop trying and don’t deserve it, because none of it is true or helpful. I don’t want to block my own blessings by believing it will never get better for me in this regard.
I wonder if people know how lucky they are. I witnessed someone in the train talking to a friend detailing her week plans. Café with friend A here, then next day meeting friend B and C at the restaurant, then the day after helping X and Y, then on Friday they’ll meet at the library, then a hike with some of those people on the weekend or whatever. I also witnessed someone else listening to a voicemail message they got where the friend was like “Hey we decided to go bowling on Thursday at 4pm, hope you’ll come too” or something.
I just don’t live in the same world as these people. I cannot grasp having friends that live near you. Friends that aren’t just online and far away. Friends that actually wanna meet and make the time. Friends who aren’t busy with a side hustle or entrepreneurship or depressed and sick or grieving. Friends that don’t constantly already have plans with their other friends that I don’t know (Am I their dirty secret? Why am I never getting introduced?). Friends that aren’t constantly busy with work and/or university or their families.
It sucks that you’ll see them spend more time with coworkers after work or university friends than you, not because they necessarily like you less, but because those other people are more convenient and there’s a proximity you two don’t have. A friend moved here about two years ago and I’ve seen her three or four times since because we don’t go to uni together and it’s more convenient for her to meet her uni friends or join a DnD group of strangers than meet me. I’m trying my hardest to never take it personally.
I don’t think I have friends near me that would plan stuff and just invite me, much less ask if I wanna hang out. Sometimes people ask and I agree but then nothing happens - like when my friend invited me and others to a barbecue and a separate roleplaying session but then both never materialized. Sometimes I offer online people to meet up within other messages and they just ignore it.
I think I seem too unreachable sometimes, too busy, too inflexible maybe. I don’t know. Recently I wasn’t even invited to the trips others took to an event I could have wanted to also go to and I had to look on as the stream of group selfies came in.
I can’t imagine someone ever wanting to meet me platonically. It only ever worked for romantic or sexual reasons. Otherwise, I was just inheriting a circle of acquaintances because my partner had friends. And the partner is the key. Without that, I would never be able to enter their homes and chats.
Until I build my own independent circle of friends, I can never trust any of them. For all I know, I am just there because I’m the girlfriend. For all I know, they don’t even really like me, and just tolerate me. I don’t want to put energy into cultivating relationships that would falter if we ever broke up. It’s clear whose side they would choose and there’s the honor code of not talking to someone’s ex anymore. I would just lose everything. Can I really share myself with them truthfully and honestly if I am just their friend’s girlfriend? No. I would always have this thought in the back of my head that I could be seen as a bad fit or bad girlfriend. They would just view everything through the lens of making sure their friend has the perfect partner. I could never show weakness.
I crave so much to have my own independent circle that is safe from the rise and fall of romantic partners.
Let it be known that nothing I tried has ever helped. Neither being overly nice and caring, nor seeming independent and low maintenance; neither oversharing or seeming mysterious; not being very open or closed off, not motherly treatment of looking after them like my sibling. It made no difference trying to look pretty and be perfect, no use being a person with many interesting hobbies and pursuits and therefore being able to have long, interesting and personal in-depth conversations. It doesn’t help that I seem to always be interested in ambitious people with normal families they love. They’ll always rightfully prioritize those.
And my ability to build friendships is so limited and atrophied that I don’t know how to put in years of effort before someone will consider me a best friend, if ever. I feel like I’m years behind. And then we’re just two people! I don’t know how to enter friend groups or build them. The rare occasion I introduced people to each other they just got along better than I got with each of them. Seems like I have to put in so much one-sided work for ages to barely click with someone while others manage that in two weeks. No one ever introduces me into their existing groups or other friends like it magically happens to others. Or they just move away, like everyone else that I clicked with and wanted to keep in my life. Or they’re too sick, too stressed, too sad and dysfunctional for friendships.
But I watch the meanest, blandest fucks that give nothing back and just use the group chat as a therapy session each day have a large group friends that jump at the first message no matter how atrocious the behavior. It’s not reassuring. I can’t contort myself into something people want to make time for. I can’t attract the people that platonically love me. I know several people who don’t deserve the friends they have at all. Makes me wanna walk into the sea and rest on the bottom of the sea floor.
Because I know what it looks like: that I’m the common denominator, that I’m the problem, that it has to be something about me. And that I somehow have to be worse than the worst people I know. I have turned myself inside out for decades now seeking the problem, because there must be the figurative shit on my shoe right? But I can’t find anything. I have ironed myself out and put whatever mask on and it’s never enough. It’s so sad that I neither have biological family nor found family. And now at 30<, everyone is disappearing into family life and their relationship cocoons anyway. I wonder if it’s true that the ones who are left and who still have time because they’re not in a relationship are really fucked up? I hope not.
Have I missed my time window? Is this just how it will be like now? That I have to be content with seeing the same face every day and do everything with one person or on my own because there’s no one else left to do it with? I’m sick. I’m sick of it. I can’t stand it anymore. If I don’t manage to diversify who I interact with on a daily basis, I’m going to become the joker, man.