loneliness

i feel it so acutely

this loneliness closing in on me

even when im in a room with another person, i still feel alone

i have few friends … few people who actually care to talk and much fewer who actually care to meet up

and of those who will, there are even fewer that i feel an actual connection with

there are few where our conversation is 100 percent natural and not stilted and perfect

i can feel so alone even around a person

because it doesnt feel like they care. theyre in their own little world, on their phone, watching a video, or talking to someone else … i feel a sense like – why am i even here? im not adding anything to their life and they dont care that im here. do i care that theyre here? and if we dont … how is that different from being alone?

im yearning – always – to feel not alone anymore. to feel belonging. to feel love. to feel companionship. to feel camaraderie. to feel togetherness.

i know that i use sex as a way to feel less alone

it’s not my only reason for having sex, of course

but i know that it helps and i know it probably isnt a healthy thing. i use dating, hookups, and flirting with strangers online to feel some semblance of not aloneness. because …

those are the people who will reply when i message

they are the people who are interested in what i have to say – or at least they pretend to be interested? if they are not actually

they are people who will actually invest their time and energy and will actually care to meet up with me and not flake last minute

and i hate that that’s how it is, even while i understand why

sometimes it makes me wonder if the only thing i have to offer of any worth to other people is my body …

it feels like that’s the only way i can keep someone’s attention

its that one on one attention that i crave for it makes me feel not alone anymore. i feel like i have a friend – someone who cares for me and who i care about too and someone to share my life with and to share their life with me. someone who notices i exist and wants to be a part of my life.

is it true? that my body is all that keeps people around?

my best friend keeps me sane. i know she is my friend for my mind and for the times we have together.

i guess i wish i could find a significant other like that

i like people but i wish they gave more of a shit about me

sometimes i wonder if i have it all backwards. that i need to learn to be happy and content with being by myself. i cant rely on someone else to make me not feel lonely.

but i dont know how to do that and is that something i should?

we’re humans. we’re naturally social creatures. we need to be around people, to talk to people, to have a community … in order to feel fulfilled. there are very few people who would actually be content to be a hermit and i think that’s less about cultivating a lifestyle and more about personality.

so i need people. its not necessarily a fact that i need to work on myself and ill be happy. i need companionship and i need friends.

but what happens when its so hard to get friends?

i find it so hard to connect with people. it always feels like everyone else connects far more and im left on the outskirts confused and anxious on what to say. i have little to say and what i do does not interest people. coupled with the fact that im far too anxious to make the first move …

i know thats something i can work on. but it terrifies me. and the more alone i feel, the more my self esteem plummets and my depression intensifies … making it even harder for me to talk to new people

i dont mean this post to be nothing but sadness. i hoped there would be a positive note to end it on but right now im at a lost for it.

i know that my loneliness negatively impacts my ability to have relationships. because im so lonely and dont have many friends, i become dependent on a partner and become anxious, depressed, and angry if they dont meet my emotional, mental, and social needs – if they become distant or distracted or start focusing on someone else other than me. and i know if i had other people who cared about me and who i cared about, i would be able to let go of a partner and let them live their own life and wouldnt feel so perpetually insecure.

and lonely.

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naive orleans

“and I finally found that life goes on without you

my world still turns when you’re not around” – “naive orleans”, anberlin

 

In those many moments when we almost broke up, it felt like the world would be over if I didn’t have him. I imagined a world without him and I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t stop crying, I couldn’t take it. It broke my heart to think of a world of mine where he wasn’t a part of it.

We stayed together because of this desperation. This anxiety at not having him around. But after I realised that I had to end it, and once I gathered up the courage to do it and not look back, I realised that the words of this song are true. Life does go on. It always does, not matter what happens. Life went on after I no longer saw him, no longer spoke to him. I went having adventures with my friends, studying, seeing my family, going on dates. Life went on and I was alright.

 

“come and go now as you please”

 

Once you realise that life goes on after a break up … that there isn’t one person who is crucial to your world – who you couldn’t survive without – then there’s a certain coldness. Because even though it would hurt to have people leave … you know you’ll be okay. You’ll be strong and you’ll learn to have a good time in spite of it. You can enter and leave my life and I’ll still keep on going and I’ll still find happiness.

In a way, it feels heartless and sad to think like that. It feels like a piece of innocence – a piece of sensitivity gone. But in another way, that’s the only way to survive and there’s no use mourning someone who is gone. Better to appreciate and share happiness with those who are still around.

money and fashion

I take an approach to fashion that …. you know what? Life is short … so we might as well spend it looking the way we want. Yes, it’s so so important and wonderful to feel good within our own skin because ultimately that’s who we are and we’re going to have to live with the bodies we have, short of getting plastic surgery.

So yes I think that it would be a wonderful thing if we could all wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see ourselves as beautiful.

And I think I’m getting better at this. I’m getting better at accepting my natural face and my natural body and even if I don’t always think I’m gorgeous … I can wake up and think hmm, not bad. Not bad.

There are moments when I wonder if it would have been easier being a guy. I think it’s amazing how most guys look EXACTLY the same the moment they wake up and when they’re at a formal event – they still look just as handsome! How? What is the secret? Why do my looks vary so wildly?

That aside, I think there’s nothing wrong with let’s say using makeup, and clothes and any form of body modifications if that’s how you want to look. Personally, I am fairly comfortable in my own body when I wake up but when I dress up the way I want to, I feel more myself. When I paint on my eyelashes, break out the black lipstick, style my hair, wear my dress and combat boots, or whatever I fancy that day, I adore the girl in the mirror because she’s beautiful and she feels right and she’s me as I want to be. It’s not to say I don’t love my natural self … but sometimes I just want to look different, ya know?

That said, I started writing this post to talk about how expensive fashion is. It costs so much money to look the way you want … to realize and embody your style. This isn’t a post to complain about the cost of things, in any aspect, because that’s not what I do and I understand why life is expensive (except glasses. Why are glasses half a grand? Like, why? I will never accept that).

Right now, I’m doing it slowly … slowly accumulating the fashion I like, getting rid of what I don’t and slowly getting closer to how I want to look. I want to get various piercings that together will cost more than 400 if I get them from a good place (and I wouldn’t risk a dodgy place when this is my body in question). Glasses cost a fortune for my prescription so it’s not easy to wear them as fashion because, honestly, one pair is more than I can afford. I still might get another pair, though, as I have a half price coupon so I’ll wait until after a few paydays and get an alternate from my standard.

I want to get my hair done, but I need to get it bleached in order to apply colors to it and I don’t trust myself to do it so again, it will cost at a salon.

Makeup is a decent price but it still all adds up and so do clothes (and it would be great if I lived in the US, because good quality makeup is not cheap here and many US companies don’t ship internationally). That’s not to mention shoes … anything below 50 dollars seems to fall apart after a few weeks.

In short, it’s like I am a project, so it’s a process and it takes time, but I’m excited to see it slowly coming together.

what is love?

I remember being so anxious the first time I said I love you in the romantic sense of it.

I know it may have been my overthinking tendencies but …

What if I didn’t really love? What if it was a lie?

The phrase “I love you” is so often thought of as such a big deal. Everyone talks about it … when did you first say “I love you?” Who said it first? How did they react? It’s a huge deal and there’s no other phrase (except “will you marry me?” perhaps) that means quite so much.

But I think maybe it’s dangerous and a little misguided to attribute so much weight to words.

I would feel compelled to say “I love you” but I would be scared to because I didn’t know if I meant it. I started thinking – what does it mean to say I love you? And I realised I don’t know what “love” means.

But does anyone know what love means? It can mean so many different things to different people.

I started wondering … who do I love? Do I even love anyone? Do I love my family? I say I love you to my father all the time … but do I even love him? I don’t feel a lot of love for him but what does it even mean to feel love?

Love is such an abstract concept that how are we supposed to know it if we feel it?

Maybe that means I have never loved anyone. That’s what I considered and it was a sad thing to think … to think that I don’t even love my family because I don’t FEEL anything and even if I did, I wouldn’t know what that something was and whether it was enough to be real “love”.

But I said I love you anyway to the boy. But I didn’t just say it because he said it first. I said it because I wanted to. Because they felt like the right words. But when I gave it more thought, I thought I was doing him a disservice.

I told him later, that maybe I don’t love you. That I shouldn’t have said it. That I don’t know what love is. And he was hurt. And he told me what it meant when he said he loved me and he said it meant he needed to be and he wanted to be with me forever. And that wasn’t what I meant. So I thought that it was true. I didn’t love him.

The lines are so blurry. How do you go from liking to affection to really liking to loving? Does anyone wake up one day and suddenly feel in love? If love at first sight is not possible … how does one make the transition to eventual love?

Maybe we should stop attributing so much weight to “I love you”. At the end of the day, they are just words. I’m sure I cannot be alone in being the only one scared to say it in case I don’t really mean it. Not everyone who says it means it, but if you can care for someone, support them, and make them happy, then isn’t that enough? Isn’t that an expression of something you could call love?

That’s not to say that I don’t support the idea of saying I love you, though. Far from it. I’m a huge supporter of words of affirmation. I adore them.

I realise now that I did love him. I still do.

And I know this now. I can’t look back on the intensity of it all and say that it wasn’t love … that it was infatuation, obsession, or a desire for attention. Because I care about him, I want him to be happy, and I love who he is.

I know this now but I didn’t know it then because I didn’t know if I wanted to be with him forever, or if I wanted to be with him at all, or if I loved who he was because he drove me insane and it’s true that I was starved for attention. Maybe I just thought I loved him because I wanted desperately to love SOMEONE.

Ironically, it was only in letting him go that I knew that I loved him. When I was with him, I was hesitant to say I love you, but when I left him, I could say it with complete confidence and I can say it with complete confidence now.

Because it was in letting him go that I let go of the obsession, let go of attention, of feeling special and wanted and let go of belonging. And I still love him now, and it makes me smile to think of everything he would do and everything that he is.

But if I really loved him, doesn’t that mean I would want to be with him …

But I don’t think so. I couldn’t be with him if only to make him happy because I know he deserves better. He deserves someone who really wants to be with him wholeheartedly and it would be selfish and cowardly of me to stay out of fear. But I don’t want to be with him and I don’t think that loving someone means they make you happy. That’s not to say that he didn’t make me happy but I know that overall it didn’t work and I’m happier and mentally healthier away from him. It’s not his fault, not at all. It just isn’t meant to be.

But I know that I love him because I still love him when he gives me nothing. And now that I am distant, I can think about him and love him for every little detail, even the annoying ones, because that’s who he is and it’s beautiful.

I don’t know if there’s any point to this post. That you have to let go before you know if you love someone? That love isn’t such a big deal?

I think it’s just a celebration of love.