I’ve always struggled with friendships. While I watched all the kids easily meld together on the playground and laugh and joke and play as if it was as easy as breathing. The thing is, breathing has been hard for me too. Sometimes I forget and gasp for air. My lungs aching at the deprivation. And struggling to understand the ins and outs of social interactions has left me emotionally gasping for air. I occasionally find people I feel I really connect with only to be brutally shown that they had been applying innuendo to my words and prying the lines of my words open to insert things that aren’t there.
I am a walking misunderstanding.
Social media was a blessing. An opening for this little lonely kid who grew into an adulting yearning for that friendship they saw growing up that came with such ease for everyone around them because I was now not confined by the towns I was in to find connection. I could find people, all over the world, that understood me.

The irony of it all is that made the loneliness worse. These friends I could connect with and talk with, too far away to be physically close to. To hear their laughter and share a hug with. And finding out, painfully, time and time again, that people notoriously lie about who they are, a concept foreign to me. The fact I cannot lie about who I am has led to straddling a line. One side is deep loneliness of being asked to show up as someone I am not, never truly being “seen” - one side is deep loneliness of showing up as who I am and being rejected.

And then the insidiousness deepened, when I found friends in person and they would only ever “lurk” on social media, read my woes, and then in person ask how I was doing and I would answer honestly and be met with, “yes, I know. I read that.” Social media leads us to believe we are so connected and in tune with others, without actually having to do anything to connect and build relationships.
And when you disappear off social media, you disappear. I’m still just as lonely, maybe even more so, as when I was on it, but at least now I don’t feed the delusions of connectedness that the suggestion of “social” media had on my brain.

I don’t know how to build a community. I want fireside chats and cups of coffee wrapped in a blanket with friends. I want conversations that mean something and honesty between us. I feel so much and I want that to be something my friends love and appreciate about me rather than try to tell me to not feel so wholly. I want to hold friends hands and bring them soup when they are sick. I want to build a life so full of community where nothing is transactional. A chosen family that doesn’t ask me to be okay with abuse and change who I am when I am not fitting into social norms. I want a life full of friendship that doesn’t hurt and so fully overshadows the fact I was born into a family that doesn’t actually love me for who I am that I don’t even think about that because it’s so far irrelevant from my life.
I wish people would show me if they care and allow themselves and me to show up as our fully messy human selves, who will make mistakes and can grow together through them.
Everything feels so urgent all the time when nothing truly is. We have time. And I want to spend it with you.