trust; or, how i learned to stop worrying and love my friends

20 Apr, 2025

This was originally going to be a two part post, but while writing Part One last night I realised it was getting a little too far into the mire for my comfort. There’s only so much winding thought about the intricacies of my personal troubles that I can believe is healthy, right? Even if I cap it with “but I’m actually okay I swear” (and genuinely believe it), it’s not helpful for me and it’s not particularly pleasant for anyone I care about who might be reading.

So instead, this is Part Two¹.

I struggled a lot with self esteem as a kid. I still do, really. I used to apologise for basically everything, and then a friend told me I should stop apologising, so I said sorry for doing that too much, ya know? I was really good at maths and sciences and okay at editing essays, so I strived to keep myself useful to people so they would keep me around. I couldn’t really conceive of anyone wanting to hang out with me otherwise.

But at some point a friend from a Uni club asked me to meet up for lunch², and it itched in my head for a while until I eventually concluded that he was genuinely going out of his way to spend time with me because he enjoyed my company - there was, for the first time in a long while, simply no other explanation I could come up with. This was Fucking Weird to try to internalise, but the thing that set it in place was that the last alternate theory I had was that this was some elaborate plot to build and then betray my confidence for nothing more than spite. Which would have been weird from anyone, but was inconceivable enough from this person I respected and liked and considered a friend that it was enough to finally break in and plant in my head that yes, other people actually do want to hang out with me sometimes, even if I couldn’t imagine why.

Of course, when I was actually broken open to it, there were other signs around. I was still helping some of my old high school friends through uni chemistry and biology at this point, but the guy who was studying architecture instead still hung out with us. The friend who had invited me to that Uni club originally didn’t actually just need one more person to fill a slot in a tabletop game. And I came to realise that I was doing my friends quite a disservice in my mental illness; these were people I knew, cared about, loved quite deeply, and yet my mental model of them included things like “this person is willing to pretend to hang out with you for years just to extract help with understanding chemical unit conversions”.

I tend to use the word love a lot more openly and casually than many people I know; “I love you” is a baseline platonic phrase in my heart, though I do use it in other senses as well sometimes. I love you means I care about you, and seeing you happy will make me happy. I love you means I would, on some level, sacrifice my own happiness to see you better off for it. Perhaps above all, I love you means I trust you, firmly, deeply; maybe not unshakably, always, but with a lot of weight.

That trust is the basis for a lot of my self esteem, and trusting people feels really good, so I think I tend to give people that deep trust more easily than I maybe should. It’s certainly gotten me hurt before, several times³. But that’s okay, ya know? I would rather get hurt every now and then than lose that trust in the people I care about. It’s a neat little feedback loop; I want to be a person who trusts their friends, because those friends deserve to have friends who openly trust them.

So, the last little while I’ve been feeling kind of isolated from the people around me. It feels like I’m surrounded by this thin membrane, and I can see people through it and even reach out and touch them, but the colours are slightly off and there’s a bit of resistance and I can’t actually quite make contact. Staying engaged in social situations takes a bit more effort, messaging people is a bit more of an uphill battle, everything just feels kind of sluggish and full of friction. I tend to be a pretty solitary girl a lot of the time, so the added energy tax hits me pretty hard; the people I would be spending time with are so very worth the effort, but there’s only so far a great value price will get you when you don’t have the spare coin to actually pay it in the first place.

This isn’t a huge issue by itself, but the timing really sucks right now. I feel like there are some people I care about who would be better served if I could be more socially fluent at the moment, and I can’t shake the sensation of opportunities to become closer friends with people that are passing me by in real time (or already have, a year ago). But! Like I said, I trust my friends, and that helps with a lot of the struggles. I trust that my friends who need my help will call on me when needed; I’m not actually that taxed emotionally by all of this, I’m just worried about people I love, and the drive to help someone in a specific way is great at blowing through the friction that holds me down. And I trust that if I can just explain what’s happening, my friends who I am afraid of missing entirely will have patience; lost time sucks, but there will in fact be future opportunities.

So like I said, genuinely, I’m actually entirely okay. It’s a fragile kind of okay, but it is one.

Of course, the practical impacts still kind of suck, right? I don’t talk to people much, and it’s been worse recently. I worry about the impression that I’m giving off.

I tend to be pretty awful at what I call “mid-range” conversation - the kind of thing that is more meaningful than “how’s the weather, any weekend plans” but less weighty than anything that starts with “hey, I need to talk to you about something”. The former I can manage, the latter I like to think I can do pretty well with, but everything in the middle - talk about books, or music, or deep personal interests, the kind of conversation where you get to know who someone actually is in a lot of meaningful ways - I struggle with a lot.

I think it’s largely a lack of practise - having gone to see my parents for easter sunday breakfast this morning while thinking about all of this, I can see why I never picked this up as much of a skill when I was a kid - sharpened by being really self conscious and a fear of trying new things. I figured out at some point that talking about shared interests works - my current interests that I picked up with the goal of sharing something with someone include one series of books, one piece of online fiction, one game, and if I’m honest this blog - and that helps sometimes, but it’s a little limited in reach, and it becomes really obvious if you do it too much.

This is also just not really a natural social role for me; last year a friend told me “you don’t say very much but when you do it’s always something good”, and honestly, that’s exactly the kind of role in a conversation that I aim for a lot of the time! Only, it’s also a social role that only works in a group setting - one on one conversation doesn’t really have room for the guy who mostly just listens along and occasionally says something quality. So I do actually need to learn how to not be that guy sometimes.

The friction makes it harder, and it feels like for every person I want to talk to more, there’s some confounding factor that spikes my uncertainty. I love you, but we’ve drifted apart in the last few years. I love you, but you’re having a bad time recently and I haven’t been able to solve it, and I feel guilty. I love you, but like you said, I don’t understand you yet, and I’m doing a poor job at changing that. I love you, but I’m also kind of envious of you and I’m worried about pushing you away. I like you, and I think I could come to love you in time, but I learned that the way I usually talk to you exhausts you and I’m still trying to adjust - is it even working? I love you, but working with you is really aggravating sometimes, and I wonder if we would be closer if we had never tried it. I love you, but I’ve struggled thus far to build an actual relationship over discord and I’m worried we’ll stop talking again when you leave. I like you, but after what happened last November I don’t think I can ever trust you again, and if I can’t have the heavy conversations with you either then what the fuck is left?

None of this feels sustainable, and it keeps me up at night sometimes. How do I build friendships this way? How can I ask anyone to trust me enough to share their deep emotional thoughts, when we don’t talk much outside of that? What must it look like, when I engage physically but then seemingly let the part where I actually care about someone lapse? How much patience do you have for a girl whose two modes of conversation are “I would die for you” and “how’s the weather”?

But then I remember that I trust my friends. I realise that no, emma, you do not somehow have an actual distinct unrelated wall blocking you from talking to each person you care about, this is literally just your own problems disguising themselves over and over again. I remember some very wise words that one of those friends told me. And I realise that I can, in fact, just talk to people, and everyone involved will be better off for it. It’s okay to fuck up a little sometimes, it’s okay to be kind of bad at this.

Of course, the friction is still there, and I’m still kind of unpractised at talking to people. But hey, I can get better. If I seem quiet, it’s not because I’m not interested! I just get in my own head really easily, and I don’t expect you to drag me out but if you find that you want to try then I will love you for the help⁴. If not, that’s okay too; I hope you’ll stick around for a while, and I’ll dig my way out eventually. Thanks for your patience.

#general #mental health #mosaic