Who Feels It?

Friendship has been difficult to locate. Support, in the hours that actually required it, has been nearly impossible. There is a particular loneliness in wanting someone to confide in, someone to let off a little steam with, and discovering that this is not available to you. I no longer know if it is available to anyone.

So I ask myself: why pretend I have friendships I don’t have? Why insist that I need them when the people who claim to be my friends give me nothing when I actually need them?

If you sit in a room full of people and feel tension instead of ease. If their jokes don’t land. If you can feel yourself being sized up, or you catch yourself sizing them up in return — you may simply be a person who does not enjoy the company of other people. And you may have spent your whole life being told this is a defect. That there is something wrong with you if you are not properly socialized, properly networked, properly folded into the herd.

But if most people make you feel worse for having been in the room with them, what exactly is the alternative? Stay because we’ve collectively decided that everyone is supposed to want company? Keep entertaining conversations that bore you past the point of politeness? Or leave, cleanly, and let the whole exchange be what it actually was: a pleasant enough conversation with a stranger you don’t know and don’t intend to.

I have chosen the second one.

I like talking to strangers. I don’t mind that we say goodbye and never speak again, because that is what happens, and it is more honest than spending years calling someone a friend before learning they were trading your information to other women online, laughing about you to an audience, discussing you with your own friends behind your back, making you the villain, sending other people after you, or doing whatever particular fucked-up thing they do to justify themselves.

I have had that experience enough times. I am done having it.

I am tired of crying because people used what I gave them as ammunition. Tired of finding out, always secondhand, what was said about me. Tired of reading the little posts. Tired of watching the little games play out in public while everyone involved assumes you’re too fucking stupid to understand what you’re looking at.

None of it was worth what it cost me.

I am angry. I am hurt. I am not interested in pretending otherwise for your comfort.

Here is what I have concluded: a lot of people do not have much capacity for depth. They either do not feel things very intensely, or those feelings do not extend very far beyond themselves. I don’t know how people like that form bonds that are anything other than shallow. Maybe they don’t. I am not claiming to be the healthiest person alive, or the kindest, or the most impressive. But I know exactly what I will tolerate and what I will not. At this point, that matters more to me than being liked.

You want to know what exists, if not friendship, if not loyalty, if not the people who are supposed to show up?

Survival exists.

Accountability to yourself exists.

Doing the correct thing when there is pressure to do otherwise — that exists.

That is sufficient. It has to be.

And to anyone reading this who knows me personally: if you have noticed my silence, it is not an accident. It is because you crossed a line I do not renegotiate. You lied to me. I found out. And I am finished.

There are two or three of you circulating out there right now to whom I offered nothing but support, and I withdraw it.

I do not want to see you.

I do not want to hear from you.

I do not want you within twenty feet of my life.

And on the small stretch of time I set aside to unwind — to curate something of my own, undisturbed — I do not want your face, your taste, or your work anywhere near my feed.

I have had enough of this from people who treat other people as disposable.

Consider, before you do it again, that someone wrote this about you.

Blue by Marni Fraser | 08.2026