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It started with a friend (North) asking me a simple question about how I form relationships. something I had never stopped and wondered about. that led to me doing some introspection, and I wrote this at the time: Adding New Friends Systems .
Recently, a friend (North) told me something that summarized almost every failed attempt I had at explaining myself in relationships. he said although I wonder around and communicate, I am not dependent on being loved, and I am not dependent on being liked by everyone. and indeed I do not move through life chasing validation or needing reassurance that I matter.
This month I have been seeking advice from people I trust about how to handle relationships in my life. there are a few relationships I deeply care about and genuinely want to preserve. but the majority of the tension I face comes from relationships I never consciously chose. they simply happened. I would find someone assuming we were friends, while I had never said so .
I keep thinking about this. a deep, returning feeling of longing for my friend Abdalwahab. I keep imagining a scene where we are together again, in the same town where we first met, walking the same streets. I miss him more than I know how to say. he is a missing essential piece, and what I feel when I sit with his absence with this imagination of going back to the places, is something close to grief, for the years we have had to live apart, growing apart in different directions, in different places, while still carrying each other somewhere we don’t talk about enough.
We carry this thought in the back of our heads. it is subtle. it is subconscious. it is so invisible that even when you write and write, trying to drag it from the subconscious into the conscious, it refuses to show itself clearly. instead, you only feel the symptoms, the void, the emptiness, the sense of being lost. but beneath all of that, there is something deeply rooted.
I remember that over the years a kind of resistance began to form between me and giving advice to others. at first I thought it was because they were too lost to see . sometimes I thought they were not ready to heal . but the truth is simpler and harder to admit. the resistance existed because I was different.
I have learned something recently that I can finally say without arrogance. when you are naturally good at enduring something, you underestimate how heavy it feels for others. there is a friction that happens when your strength becomes someone else’s weakness. and instead of recognizing that difference, I was projecting my own structure onto them.