Friendships, Loneliness, And Tired of Chasing after people.

@tryingtosurvive2024 Thank you for opening up about what you’re going through. It sounds like you’ve been carrying a heavy load for a long time, and I can only imagine how exhausting it must feel to be caught in such an isolating situation. You’ve done so much to try to connect with others, and it’s clear that friendship is really important to you.

@tryingtosurvive2024

I'm saddened to hear about your struggle with loneliness. I get what you're feeling, I've left my home/city at 18, left my country at 25, and then changed three countries until today; I'm 42 and, until very recently, my only opportunities to make friendships were I work. I could never make true friends with anyone because of culture and class difference and one thing I noticed was that the older I get, the harder it is to make friends. Most other people already have their own friend groups, families etc. and getting the feeling that someone else truly cares about you is difficult - no one calls to ask or just to talk and share time together. I received tonnes of advice from well intended people on how to be less lonely (go out, meet new people, go on dating sites) - frankly, I think such advice does more harm than good when it comes from people that have what you lack: people to talk to.

But I have been lucky, in a way. I sat with my loneliness and try to understand why nature gave us this feeling; nature does not generally build system that are not necessary. We cannot survive on our own, so we get the feeling of loneliness to seek community and ensure our survival; this made sense when we were living in tribes, but nowadays we largely do not need to seek community to survive.

My findings are that loneliness stems from a lack of validation, the validation that we exist and that we are humans - this is why we can feel very lonely with a group of people, but can also not feel lonely when we are alone. What I noticed is that we have four types of validations: external-positive (friends, family), external-negative (social media), internal-negative (our tormenting negative thoughts) and internal-positive.

I noticed that if I focus my efforts on internal-positive type of validation, loneliness goes away. Don't get me wrong, there wasn't an aha-moment anywhere, it took more than a year and the help of an amazing therapist. To validate yourself in a positive way, do things that bring you joy and that make time fly (state of flow). For me these have been day-dreaming/planning my future, picking up tennis and attending a painting art class - nothing related to my job or work colleagues, but entirely related to what I liked to do as a child. After a while, instead of hoping others will say hi or invite me or talk to me, I am the one turning down invitations and ending conversations because they are just boring! I cannot wait to leave work and go home and do what I like to do, by myself (planning, journaling, painting) or with likeminded people (tennis, painting) and my weekends are now on my terms: I want to lose myself in 6 hours of painting today, making a painting with unicorns for an acquaintance's 4-year old daughter. I'm now planning to start a cooking course: better my cooking skills and receive feedback from other students., maybe make a career shift and open my own restaurant in a few years down the road.

Inside of us there's always a little child; let that little child out and let yourself daydream: what activities did you like to do as a kid? Pick one or two, give them a try; you may not feel good about them, pick a few others afterwards.

I genuinely wish you to find ways to get rid of loneliness; it robs us of joy.