It is difficult to not look at my life from the past and not feel diminished in some way. The siren song of nostalgia is a difficult to tune resist, as I find myself feeling more isolated and alone than I have in years. I speak with fewer people on a regular basis these days. I have fewer recent conversations in all of my communication channels. I have no weekly events except the one I have laboriously scraped together every Sunday. I barely have the energy to even think about making any kind of positive changes to my life, let alone actually making any changes. I am in a rough patch and the thought that yesteryear was better is a difficult one to deny when I am watching the sun set while I fill up my water bottle for my final hour of work as the building settles into silence and darkness on a Friday evening. I am not the only one working still, but, like me, we all work in isolation and silence, largely unaware of each other’s presence. I do not know their life situations, but a part of me wonders if they, too, have little waiting for them but a trip home and a quiet weekend doing their own things. Sure, I’ll do some grocery shopping and get my weekly takeout before I settle into my apartment for another weekend, but that’s not much of a social life. The events I have this weekend will hopefully keep me from falling into the silence and isolation I’m increasingly familiar with these days, but it’s little comfort as I feel the building’s heat shut off and the temperature begin to drop while I’ve still got work to do.

One of the things I’ve observed over the past year–a year defined not by the calendar or any outwardly apparent event so much as the start of a drug program meant to help me with some skin issues that has dragged on past its one-year anniversary and made me the least comfortable in my body that I’ve ever felt–is how much of my social life was driven by me. The main effect of this medication regimen has been the slow dwindling of my energy as the achy stiffness of my body has turned everything I do into an event that requires concentrated effort to accomplish. I no longer have the energy to push myself to go out, to struggle through the process of making plans with my friends or keep up the low-grade conversational hum with the people I can only connect with online, and all of those things have faded as a result. I do not think my friends are only concerned with me so much as I make myself present in their lives, but I do have a lot of friends who tend to be passive, who are focused on their immediate surroundings to the exclusion of anyone or anything distant, or who just don’t think to check up on people (be it a lack of the need for that in their own lived experience or an unfortunate side effect of some aspect of their mental health). It is not terribly surprising to find all those relationships gathering dust as my list of daily chats has dwindled to one, but knowing the reasons behind it doesn’t really help when I’m struggling to gather the energy needed to be the only one willing to, for example, push two people to actually schedule a group game night beyond the passive chat of whether or not they have a free night in the next seven days.

I know it isn’t personal. I know they all have problems of their own to attend to. I know that the past decade has been rough on all of us, the past eight years especially so, and the past four unprecedentedly oppressive. I am not alone in these feelings and I would bet at least half the people I used to speak with almost daily, if not daily, are struggling in a manner similar to me. I wish I had the energy and mental fortitude required to do something about it, to be able to put in the effort to reach out and be met with short, terse answers and no attempts to carry the conversation on past that point, without needing to spend time recovering from the emotional drain of once again being rebuffed by inaction or silence. But I don’t. I am slowly recovering from my sleep deprivation. I’m slowly and unsteadily sleeping more. As I go through physical therapy and recover from issues I hadn’t even realized had cropped up, masked as they were by my back pain and the general achiness and stiffness of my past year, I am slowly regaining the energy I once had. I’m slowly approaching the point where I know I can handle reaching out to friends and having all my hopes of making plans dashed by indifferent schedules or silences that last long enough to disrupt potential plans until, finally, after a handful of tries, something works out, but I’m not there yet. Moreover, the increasing silence of the past year has changed my social landscape. Not because of the silence, but because a bridge kept up only by constant maintenance on my part might not be worth rebuilding now that things have begun to settle on my side of the divide. New bridges might be made, new relationships forged, but that will take a while longer yet since the demands of putting myself out there like that need far more than what it takes to spend a few weeks getting a three-person game night together.

Part of me wishes I could go back a few years, to when I resolved to make a series of difficult but necessary changes to my life and do it all over again. To find ways to keep relationships I discarded by trying harder to make them more balanced and healthy. To find a way to avoid all the pitfalls I fell into once I started asserting that my emotional needs and identity were important. To, somehow, make different choices that somehow allowed me to do what was right for me and yet maintain all the unhealthy, unsupportive, or codependent relationships at the same time. To somehow make it okay that the people I was once close to keep putting pitfalls between us or that used our connection to drain everything they could from me. I was less lonely then. Worse off, of course, but less lonely.

Nostalgia like this is a poison fruit no matter how you cast it. Even indulging in it, something I feel I need to do in order to sort through my tangled emotions and resolve my weary heart, has cost me more than I expected. There are too many might-have-beens branching off that rose-tinted road for me to walk it safely. It is too easy to imagine a world where even one or two of those lingering silences was instead filled with the bubbling chatter I once relied on. Even now, knowing the danger it presents to my still-fragile well-being, I can’t help but wonder how things might have been different if it had not been a year and a half since the last time I spoke to a friend. That one stings a bit differently than the others, though, since I promised her a silence she had just admitted she wanted and I am stuck waiting for her to break it as I could not live with the amount of hypocrisy required to violate a boundary I promised to respect after how much I’ve struggled with other people doing that to me. I don’t think it will ever end at this point, but I still find myself wondering, sometimes, about what kind of world it would be if that silence suddenly broke after all this time. Just like I wonder what life would be like if my parents suddenly gained the ability to recognize and take responsibility for the part they played in my childhood and early adulthood trauma. The idea is tempting at the best of times and, now, when I’m struggling with feeling isolated and alone, it proves to be almost more than I can resist indulging, even knowing nothing good would come from it.

Almost. I managed to tear myself away from the familiar song playing as I watched the rose-hued sunset and felt myself go spiraling into “what-ifs” before I hit the point of no-return. Before I lost my evening to thoughts of alternate pasts and their different presents. Instead, taking the paths I’ve already walked and the gentle, crystalline sadness they woke in me, I’ve copied them down here so I can look at them more clearly and then leave them behind once I’m done. To let myself feel this way and then let it go. To reflect on why I thought I wanted to press on this particular bruise and then move on with my day. Because I might not yet have the energy needed to make new friends and I might have to still be very selective in what fruitless attempts I make at socialization, but I’m at least making progress again, after months of all-consuming exhaustion and pain, and that’s nothing if not a clear step forward into something better than I would have had months ago. And better than I would have felt years ago because at least this time I know that the people I’m spending energy on will eventually fully return it, spending in kind, once we deal with the various issues of adulthood and life in the ever-difficult present. Objectively, and subjectively when I think about it for more than a few sad moments, I’m better off than I was last year and the year before, and the year before than and any year in the past seven or eight, at the very least. Not in every possible way, of course, but in enough ways that they make up for the ways in which I’m not.