An Open Letter

I’d like to believe that I’ve had to work hard for the successes I’ve had in life. I’m kinda thankful that I’m not really naturally good at a lot of things. I started LoL at silver, and now I’m aiming for masters fairly comfortably. I started lifting incredibly scrawny, and I joined the 1k club in a year. Compared to others, I was pretty stupid and a low achiever, and now I’m finishing my masters with a 4.0 at the top of my class. I used to be horribly clingy and depressed, and now I’m someone strangers describe as happy, and I consider myself to be emotionally sound. I want to believe this narrative where I’ve had my successes in life because of how hard I’ve worked at things I was not always good at. I like this because that means that I can do virtually anything I put my mind to. I had my last novice basketball game today, and it went pretty poorly. I didn’t get any chances to warm up, and didn’t get many chances with the ball during the game anyway. I’m still doing my best to enjoy it, and I had a pretty good time all things considered – even after the game, the opponents asked me specifically to join them for 3v3 based fully on personality, I believe. I asked if my other two teammates who were there could join, and they said no (which is a rough position, but I am happy that they wanted to play with me).

All of this was a weird pre-ramble because I was moving over notes from my old Google Keep, and I saw some of the images I had saved from earlier in therapy when I was collecting evidence to help me believe that I am loved. One of them was a screenshot from E, where they told me that I am a good friend, and she wants to put in the effort to make sure not to lose me when she goes overseas. My gut reaction was a “that’s ironic”, given how that didn’t happen, and for some reason or another, we fell apart there. But it made me think about putting in effort in relationships, and how I was talking with my therapist earlier today about that briefly. I don’t think I’m a stranger to putting in work, especially with how much I’ve had to self-learn about socialization and all that, given my isolated upbringing. I want to be a human and just lament about how others have fallen short of what I know is possible, but thinking about it right now in this instance I kinda feel like maybe I DON’T understand the type of work they have to do. So how am I supposed to know what they did or what they didn’t?

I often think about the situation of someone leaving home to go to college or move away for something like that, and how a lot of people are torn up having to leave their family. That must be incredibly hard to have that level of stability, reliability, and community – hell having that family and having to leave it. But at the same time, me leaving family is a good thing, and moving far away from them at most is an inconvenience of not having the ability to ask my Dad for help driving up for when I have to move to some other city for an internship. I don’t need to worry about proximity since I have no proximity with my family, even online (aside from my Dad). I am no contact with my Mom, and I have no clue what’s happening with my sister so that’s effectively the same. And with my Dad, it’s mostly just like a manager where we sporadically text for logistics like moving, or medical insurance purposes. Yeah that sucks, but I never have to deal with the abrupt change of losing that the same way others may have to when leaving their families. Maybe it’s similar for socialization and friendships. One benefit of not having the ability to grow up with people in the normal way is I don’t have to worry about baggage from that as much. Maybe I’ve had friends who have fallen short of my mark in the past because they’ve had bad models of friends growing up, and I push against that mold in a way that’s unfamiliar. For me, the nice thing is that virtually everything (except Discord friends) is unfamiliar, and so there’s a big sense of comfort there. Maybe it’s just tonight, but I feel a sense of peace at this whole problem that’s stuck with me for a while.