Connecting feels so foreign 

One of the first things that happens when you get with a narcissist is that they cut you off from everyone and everything good for you. 

Add in the craptastic time that was 2020 and honestly, after all that, I just stopped trying to make new friends or even really connect with anyone on anything more than a superficial level. 

Which, on the outside looks really fun, but on the inside it’s honestly just really lonely. 

But now that my divorce is happening and I am feeling my footing and who I am again, I realize that connection— something that should feel so natural and so normal— feels really off to me. 

Is it my inability to trust? MY own lack of self worth? It’s like the second I make friends irl I’m one hundred percent sure they’re just trying to Carrie me at the prom. 

And I don’t know why. It’s not like ever in my whole life has anyone become my friend only to spite me or to win some bet. 

Man, the more I think about it, the more I blame teen movies. Why did they have to give us all a complex that people who became our friends were just messing with us? 

Anyway, that’s my whole point here. This connection thing is a lot. I don’t really trust myself to do it well, and that does absolutely come down to a total lack of self worth.

Man, if you’re still reading and you haven’t seen a pattern here yet, then— well, thanks? But my whole point is, every single day I feel like I get up, and work on my self worth just a little bit more. 

And I think the hardest part of that is, I can’t quantify exactly what it is I’m doing each day to understand my worth and see it a little better, I just know that it’s something I’m doing. You know? 

That’s the next phase of this, I think. To keep making connections. Connections that make me see my worth in a healthy positive way. In a way that doesn’t drain me. In a way that is for me and my growth, and not in a toxic, scary way that breaks down everything I work so hard to build. 

Let’s do this.