It’s probably a form of internal survival trait that forces you to look after yourself but it’s horrid how isolating being around people can be sometimes when you’re sad, friends and strangers alike. Horrid and exhausting, especially as someone who gets their energy from being around other people, from spending time socially. When I cut myself off entirely I become deeply unhappy, but when I allow myself those social spaces there is still a part of me determined to cut myself off.

Even when I try to open myself up to people, there is an insistent little bitch inside me that says “they don’t understand”, which is, of course, true, but no different from any other life experience I think. I tend to be more surprised when people seem to understand things about how I think or feel and it’s those moments that open me up to trusting them. But that shouldn’t be the case in a planet full of people I can’t understand and who, in turn, cannot understand me.

Maybe it’s a way of running from everything? If you don’t understand then I don’t have to try to explain it to you. Explaining is exhausting, especially when it comes to the last year or two. The little written posts on my tumblr equate to me explaining in my own time, but it’s also filtering, it’s also preventing you from understanding things about me because they’re things of which I am ashamed or angry etc.

Another thing I’ve been stressing over about myself (I spend a godawful amount of time thinking about myself, which is disgusting in itself) is that the fact that people want to understand doesn’t feel like enough. The fact that people care enough to try to understand doesn’t feel like enough. Ultimately, it feels like they’re working to understand a lie and that makes me feel even guiltier and more isolated and shitty.

I wish I could attribute all of this sadness and shittiness to post-holiday blues or to the reality of my life as a graduate or whatever but in all honesty it’s so much more complicated than that (“you wouldn’t understand”) and has been going on for such a long time, far longer than the space of eleven months since my dad died. I think it’s called being human.

*That came across a little more creepily than originally intended. Sorry.