My work in therapy recently has circled back around to how I’ve distanced myself from most people and how I haven’t felt very connected in my friendships. I’ve felt like I’ve had castle-quality walls up that I can’t even begin to think about working through.
I’ve been here before. Post divorce, post villianizing myself for leaving my ex-wife despite it being the right decision, post losing almost all of my closest friends in that mess – I isolated hard. It took me years to open back up to the idea of wanting close friends or the idea of wanting community again. In 2021 I finally took steps toward doing that. I jumped on BumbleBFF and actually made friends from the app. I wanted to find a queer community, I wanted to feel understood, and I wanted to feel connected and that’s exactly what I did. I was hosting game (or gayme) nights once a month, going out with a little group of queer humans who had become family, and my heart felt more full than it had in a long long time despite the fact that I was all over and kind of a mess in my romantic relationships. I realized that the thing that I had been missing for a lot of my life was close, queer, platonic friendships and I actually had that for a couple years.
At the beginning of 2023 though, that ended. Miscommunication, misunderstandings, and emotional immaturity between two others and myself in the group led to a falling out. I started to distrust any type of friendships again. I isolated. I pushed everyone who was still trying to be close to me away. I wanted nothing to do with friendships in general and I didn’t want to let anyone close enough to risk being hurt again. I felt like I had leaned so hard into those friendships that when the reality of what the friendships were came to light, I fell hard on my face and then I refused to even try to stand back up.
Lately though, I’ve felt that voice in the back of my mind come back. That voice and part of me that wants connection and friendship. The part of me that feels so damn alone when I don’t have close queer friendships in my life. But this time, rather than feeling like I’m ready to jump onto BumbleBFF or try to make friends out in the real world, I have two equal parts of me pulling me in two different directions. One side of me wants that connection, wants those friends, and is putting some effort into it. The other side of me wants absolutely nothing to do with it, doesn’t want to trust it, doesn’t want to let anyone else close enough to really get to know me, and doesn’t want to care about other people.
That second part of me is a weird one for me to feel though. It’s not just a fear but a contrasting want or desire. There is a part of me that legitimately wants to keep those walls up, live in my thick-walled castle because that does seem significantly safer and easier. That part of me wonders if I’ve always let people in too close and cared too much to the point of falling into codependent patterns that actually having healthy boundaries with friends feels distant and lonely anyway and like I just don’t care. Maybe those walls that I feel now are just really firm boundaries that I have in place and it’s the codependent part of me that’s lonely, not the healthy part of me.
Or maybe I’m in this in between period of finding the balance between codependent friendships and not letting any friends into my inner circle at all. There must be a balance between the two and I thought I was there before but maybe I wasn’t – maybe I needed this second swing back to the ‘not letting anyone in’ side of extremes in order to slowly ease back into figuring out exactly what healthy boundaries are for me. Maybe they’re not these castle walls but they are something similar… something that feels like walls but not an actual, impenetrable fortress.
I’m not entirely sure where I’m actually at with all of this or what will come of it. Maybe I’ll do a follow up post if I ever actually figure out what’s going on in this brain and heart of mine on this particular topic. It’s always good to be introspective and try to figure out how to move through this world in the most healthy way possible whether that’s in friendships, in relationships, in relationship with ourselves, or just generally with all of the interactions that we have every day.
I think that that’s all we really can do and that’s all that we can hope for other people to do also. If I wasn’t thinking about all of it then I wouldn’t be growing or learning though so, I suppose, I’m glad that my brain sometimes runs me in circles on topics like this. I’d say I think that that’s pretty normal but maybe it’s not. Either way, if you’re someone who thinks a little like me then I hope this made you feel a little less alone and little more understood.
Until next time,
Chelsea
CKB Coaching, LLC 