Hi Prash.

I’ve been feeling disconnected like this for at least a year, if not two. It started after I had a really bad breakup. I was bereft and broken because I destroyed what could have been a beautiful relationship by being insecure in myself. I couldn’t accept what I’d done, and then I got really sick.

When Im with my friends and feeling absent, it tends to be that I’m thinking of how I’m presenting. How I’m behaving when I’m around them. How uncomfortable I feel, and how they speak of me when I’m not around (which my mind manages to convince me that it’s never good). I feel guilty. I feel like a bad friend. I feel guilty for thinking negative things.

I don’t have sources of happiness, particularly. Nothing that lights my fire like it used to. I find happiness in animation, like Steven Universe. I can focus my attention long enough playing certain video games to feel something other than what I describe as a scribbly, tangled irritation.

Most of whom I consider my close friends are sources of inspiration and happiness for me. Their shining makes me glow, in a manner of speaking. I feed off their energy and happiness and try to emulate it in my own life. But it’s almost like object impermanence, where once we’re apart, my personal stormcloud comes back to hover over my head and pour down on me.

If it isn’t a stormcloud, it’s this permeating, penetrating emptiness I feel. Like scorched earth going on for miles and miles.