What is it to be alone? You’re always with yourself, no? So it is hard for me to ever truly feel alone. Considering I believe myself to be a plurality always at war with itself (though I can barely call it an it or a self) there is no I to be alone. But loneliness is not mutually exclusive with company.
One of my best friends I haven’t spoken to in nearly a year now. I’ve considered myself content with her decision to terminate the friendship for a long time. At first I truly believed that I could work things out, and when that made things worse I believed that things would work themselves out, and when nothing came of that I eventually reached out, for the final time, to no response.
I hadn’t looked at our final conversations until today. Honestly, I could say the words were burned into my brain but that would be a lie. I don’t remember the exact phrasing used in really any of the paragraphs that we each sent. I do remember being there, though. I exist within my body at the time now as much as I did then.
And I don’t exactly miss her. I think she treated me poorly at the end, and I never got an I’m sorry – she believed I was the bad friend. But sometimes I feel lonely. Not because I don’t have close friends now, not because there is a her shaped hole in my heart that I’ve been desperate to fill for 11 months, but I feel lonely within myself. I tend not to trust the thoughts that run through my head because of how powerful they are, but in the same vein I don’t trust anything but those thoughts. As much as it is so easy and satisfying to sink into your own filth and experience your own sob story, the bastard working overtime up there to give you hope is relentless.
I read the argument we had at the end again today, and I feel weak. Weak in that I didn’t stand up for myself, and weak in that I don’t believe that I deserved to be stood up for.
“you continue to validation seek. if it’s not from me, it’s from someone else, and you won’t fucking stop. it is incredibly annoying and draining talking to someone constantly begging for validation”.
I think that was uncalled for, and I know I’m not giving you the context for any of this and for that I apologize. I suppose you’ll just have to trust me that I wasn’t actually some ill defined idealistic villain in this story.
“you won’t fucking stop. you won’t fucking stop. you won’t fucking stop.”
It takes a thousand words of encouragement to feel an ounce of pride, but a single word of contempt to be condemned to self pity. Like an opiate injected into your blood, coursing through your veins and making its way to the heart, the reinforcement of self doubt by another will take down the mightiest of brains with the most fortitude, because it does not need to deliver itself. It makes its way through your ears into your mind and it latches on like a parasite and lets YOU do the rest.
it won’t fucking stop. it won’t fucking stop. it won’t fucking stop.
I’m going to die one day. And sometimes I feel that I am on a path to suffer while I hurt everyone around me until they all leave, and I am left alone to shrivel up and die. Sad, self important, unimportant, and then nothing. But we are all nothing to someone, and I think we are all something to someone else. You must find the right someones, but more importantly find the right somethings. You can be alone but never lonely, when you have the right somethings.