Dear Failure,
I recently turned 25 and am generally freaking out about life. Before the pandemic started, I had so many goals and plans and now everything feels on hold and I feel stuck in a way that I've never felt stuck. I have been blowing up my life recently and I don't know if I'm losing my mind or making some of the best choices of my life.
6 months ago I broke up with my first serious boyfriend. We were together for almost 8 years. I miss him, but I know that we couldn't be together anymore. I no longer felt attracted to him as anything more than a friend. He asked me to move in with him when my lease was up at the end of the summer. I wanted to want to move in with him, but when I thought about living every day next to each other, I didn't feel excited. I felt dread. He didn't take it well when I said I wasn't ready. This made me feel even better about my decision. He said I was a sociopath for not seeming upset at all, and I'm worried he might be right. I didn't feel sad and I didn't cry when he broke up with me. I felt resigned like I knew this was going to happen someday and I just had to get through the moment until I could get away from him. Don't I sound horrible? I miss him, but it's more the idea I had of our relationship than what it actually felt like to be together. Does that make sense?
I'm writing because not long after the breakup, a friend of mine who's a little older than me and recently married asked if I didn't ever want to commit to someone. But it didn't sound like a real question. I felt like what she was saying was "Are you sure you really want it to be over? You don't know if anyone else will ever want to be with you again." Maybe that's totally in my head and that's not what she meant at all, but either way, I felt judged and like it would be a totally different conversation if I wasn't a woman in my mid-20s.
My parents have been together for over 30 years and I feel like I've disappointed them even though my mom's been threatening divorce since I was a kid. I'm questioning everything about myself and why I feel the way I do. I don't want to see or talk to my friends about it because almost all of them are in long-term relationships or engaged or on the way to that kind of life, all before 30. I feel ashamed that I don't seem to want what any of them want, at least right now, and I feel like every time I share how I feel my friends think I'm judging them and their decisions. I feel really lonely not being able to freely share what I'm going through with anyone.
I know I don't want to be with my ex, but I also have tried pandemic dating and I don't know if I can do that either. The happiest I feel right now is when I'm totally alone with my cat, staring at the ceiling. I feel like I'm failing at life, like everything's falling apart, but I don't care. I want to care, but I don't know how right now. Can you help?
Can't Feel a Thing
Dear Can’t Feel a Thing,
Reading your letter made me question if I somehow traveled back in time and wrote a letter to my future self so I could write myself back from the future with an understanding I have now that I could have never had ten years ago. I think you know what I mean by this and this is why you wrote to me. And why you feel like you're letting everything fall apart and don't know how or don't want to do anything about it. Could it be that our mutual failures are what allow us to most connect with ourselves and each other?
You are existing in a beautiful and painful moment in your life that's necessary before everything can shift in the direction of what you most desire. You're holding a flashlight in a very dark forest, taking your time as you go to make sure you don't fall off the side of a cliff! No wonder you can't feel very much right now! You're too busy taking each careful step so you don't end up walking in circles or going in the opposite direction of where you want to go. You cannot see the whole forest, you can only trust each step and your ability to read your inner compass.
You have been brave enough to begin a journey on your own with only so much light. Right now you need a community that you understand and that understands you. I get the impression that the friends that are currently in your life are friends you have grown up with and who are beginning to settle into heteronormative lives that are becoming less and less appealing to you. That makes sense. I want you to know that a lot of us, the failures and the queers and the outsiders and the want-too-muchers, go through this around your age and even at my age in the mid-30s and probably for the rest of our lives to a certain degree. There are waves of marriages and then babies and then divorces and then deaths and it goes on and on.
It's scary to see people splitting off at first, walking down paths that may never connect back to yours. Allow yourself to grieve this loss and the discomfort of uncertainty. It hurts to lose anyone, even when you're only losing the idea you had of what your lives might look like together. It's especially difficult when you're making choices at a time in your life that don't line up with whatever's considered the norm in the culture you're wrapped up in. A lot of people don't want to get married at 25 or 35 or 45 or 55. More than 40 million people currently live in a single-income household and 34% age 15 and older have never been married as of 2021, but the needs of single people are still often ignored or portrayed in stories in a negative light or not accounted for at all. Isn't that strange?
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