Been thinking about this a lot lately, and how the majority of my desires to connect with people come from my lack of love from my family, and thus, feel like a well I’ll never be able to fill or draw from.

The majority of the experiences I’ve had in connecting with people (mostly online) lead me to either position myself far away from that person, out of a belief that this person will never reciprocate the warmth I desire (which I think is actually true), or lead me to invest myself in them deeply, but not in a way that forms an unbreakable bond. After all, making a bond with someone you don’t really know is quite unlikely, so just as strongly as it solidified, it’s dissolved.

I’ve mostly found that for me, the solution to my longing for human connection is:

1): less TikTok (it makes you feel like you’re connecting with “your people”, but the second you leave the bubble, the wave of depression hits :)

2): Making phone calls instead of texting, so that I can actually gauge and have some minor level of getting to know the other person. (This one is tough because no one around my age or even around me in general wants me to call them?? It’s quite literally just my best friend or my boyfriend who’ll let me randomly dial him, and he’s often busy. Wish the teens would come around to calls again 😔)

3): Taking my time. I think this realization comes eventually with age and maturity, but after plenty of great internet friends, I came around to believing that a good friendship cannot be forged in haste. My best friends took a while, so if I'm going to get the nice things, I need to let them happen to me, rather than force them.

However, the wall I'm talking about is that even with all the pillars in place, knowing what authentic love should feel like makes no sense to me. I have to concept of how to love someone other than the one boy I fell in love with when I was 13, and uh...that relationship was probably the most unhealthy one I've ever had.

Since then, I've tried my best to conjure up feelings that I think resemble love, but I know that the second someone is close enough to me such that I can love them, I find myself abandoning that hope for the smallest reasons, or even just out of pure lack of internal energy needed to express care. It's made me stay away from putting my emotional self out there, feeling like I won't be able to keep it up enough.

Would appreciate another brain's opinion on this, if you would be so kind. Thanks for reading my blabber, also.