My calendar back then looked enviable from the outside. Group chats buzzing constantly. Weekends fully booked. People who genuinely seemed to enjoy having me around.
And underneath all of it, a loneliness i did not have language for yet, because loneliness was not supposed to look like this. It was supposed to look like empty rooms, not packed ones.
Took me a while to understand what was actually happening. I had gotten very good at being liked and very bad at being known. The version of me at all those gatherings was curated for ease. Agreeable. Light. Fun in the surface way that gets you invited everywhere and known by no one in particular.
That kind of loneliness is hard to explain to people, because saying it out loud sounds ungrateful. You have so many friends, people would say. And i did, in the loosest sense of that word. What i did not have was a single person who had seen the parts of me that were not curated for group approval.
Real connection asks for something riskier than being fun to have around. It asks to be seen on the days you are not entertaining, not easy, not performing fine. That is a much bigger gamble, because it means someone might actually look closely and decide they do not want what they find there.
I started letting a few people closer, slowly and uncomfortably. Told the truth when i was struggling instead of the polished version. Some people drifted once the easier version of me was no longer the only one on offer. That told me something honest about what those relationships had actually been.
But a few stayed. And what they gave me was different from anything that crowded calendar ever provided. Actual company. Not noise filling the space where loneliness used to live.
Surrounded does not mean connected. I learned that the hard way, in rooms full of people who liked me and did not know the first real thing about me.
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