Fear and Loneliness in Toronto

06.07.20

I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness and the nature of relationships lately. Being stuck in my apartment all day and not being able to see any of my friends or spend any meaningful time with anyone has me feeling pretty alone, I guess.

I wonder about the push and pull of deep friendships, and about how you can so easily allow loneliness to pull you into a trap of assuming the worst in the people who you know truly care about you. It’s a dark and winding downward path into tangles of bitterness and inklings of worthlessness and feeling pathetic. You start to think disfigured and untrue thoughts like “well, if I miss him right now, and he probably doesn’t think of me at all, what does that make me?” or “if he really cared about me, he’d make the time,” and then you rashly commit to taking immediate and necessary action to avoid being hurt or feeling used. The thing is, you know these things aren’t even true, and you know you’re not really being fair, but you’re afraid because the more attached you become to a person, the easier it is for them to elate you, but also to hurt you, in word or deed or lack thereof.

In these moments of loneliness, I’ve found that it’s important to give my friends credit where credit is due, and to have faith in the friendships. All of life is an interpretation, and you can choose to approach things from the perspective of love rather than fear. Sometimes people are just busy and that’s okay. Sometimes you aren’t a priority, and that’s also okay – it doesn’t mean you aren’t important. Just because your world is relatively still, doesn’t mean it isn’t moving for anybody else. Let your friends be busy, and let them live their lives, and trust that sooner or later you’ll have some time together again. The important thing is to be grateful for the time you do get to spend together, and to make it count for something. Especially now, it’s so important to connect in any way that you can, and to cherish those connections.

I’ve always been kind of a needy person in very specific ways, even though I like to call myself low-maintenance. Sometimes I can be too demanding from the people I care a lot about. But I’m learning to manage all of that and not feel so entitled. I’m learning how to let things be and not jump to feeling betrayed or hurt or abandoned. But it’s hard.

I think a lot of my fear stems from a history of failed relationships and moments of true and deep-cutting disillusionment with people I really considered my closest friends.

Back in my last year of university, my circle of friends at the time planned a whole spring break trip to New Orleans and didn’t even think to invite me. I’m still friends with most of them, and I can joke about it now, but it was a really wounding experience at the time and it made me deeply question my place in people’s lives, as petty and self-involved as that sounds. It made me realize that there was such a huge discrepancy between my perception of things and the reality of them, and it was a little disorienting and very heartbreaking. It made me feel stupid for assuming more closeness than there was.

I have two best friends from childhood and we spent years talking about how we were going to grow up together and be in each other’s lives until we died. They were two people who were total constants in my life and who I truly believed I would always be able to count on no matter what. But so many things have happened and now I flat out don’t talk to one and I barely talk to the other (although I still believe that eventually, somewhere down the line, we’re going to find our way back to each other).

So sometimes it kind of feels like I’m just waiting for the next person I care about to start slowly drifting away, and I’m once again going to have to resign myself to just letting it happen. I personally know how quickly things can change, and it scares me.

I guess the thing I have to remember is to not let my fear from past experiences dictate how I conduct and move forward with my relationships now. I need to have more faith in people, and if the things I fear will happen do come to pass, that’s okay too. We need to practice continuing to choose the path of love anyway.