Love as a Verb

16th Apr, 2025

Hi! here I am again lol

Why is it that every time I sit here and painstakingly etch out a post, I end up coming back a couple hours later with something meaningful to say (I hope)... but if I don't write at all then, well. I don't write at all. Y'know?

Surely there's a metaphor in that somewhere.

This one is going to be quite goddamn personal again, which I think is fine but also I'm sorta nervous about now that I'm aware this is technically open to the wider internet. It's entirely possible that strangers will come across this; or more frighteningly, people that I know - but not quite that closely, y'know?

Nevertheless, here we are. I've never thought of vulnerability as a bad thing, at least not while I'm in a decent frame of mind. If people don't wanna read my rambles about loving my friends, they simply don't have to read it.

This is going to be a very honest post. For all that it is about loving my friends, it's also about how I struggle to be or feel loved. It's full of quite a few things that I haven't found a way to say yet, and many of them are unpleasant, although I hope we will come circle back to more lovely things by the end. They may make you quite angry, or upset, or tired.

This could very well be some kind of turning point, although I know not at all which direction it will take. Then again, it may be barely a blip on everyone else's radar. I don't know.

At the very least, I hope it's interesting.

(Mid-post edit: Oh, it's also turned out to be REALLY FUCKING LONG, and I'm not even done typing yet. I do believe this is an important one, so if you are among my closest circle and you can still summon some care and hope, I urge you to read all the way through, even if you have to do it in bites.)
(If you're anyone else, well... strap in, or tap out now. I won't blame you for the latter.)

🐝 🐝 🐝

Tonight has been a bit of a wild ride.

I spent the day doing nothing very much, in spite of my intentions. I was meant to go for an evening walk with a friend, just to hang out and chat, but the day defeated me well before I got that far. Sometimes surrender is the best choice, though. I hope to see them on Thursday with some other friends instead, and if I'm very lucky we will go for that walk together afterwards, just me and them.

Ironically, I ended up going for a totally different walk with a totally different friend, much later in the evening. This wasn't at all planned; I decided to go out and catch pokemon and on a whim I invited them, fully expecting they would be occupied or too tired after work. I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong, and it was a lovely (if rather short) walk.

I felt pretty damn good about this, even as I was also a bit worried about my group of friends as a whole. That latter part ended up being the topic of tonights earlier post, unfortunately. In hindsight, I wish I'd mentioned the walk and how it made me feel earlier.

Then I got home, and something started going downhill. I'm not quite sure where it started; I got a particularly disappointing email, but I doubt that was enough of a catalyst.

I think at some point it just occured to me that I am so often the one in my relationships to initiate interactions, and this... hurt. I did something stupid. I followed that feeling.

The result is a list, still sitting in a Discord server inhabited only by myself, of all the times I have hung out with friends in roughly the last three weeks. Appended to each instance is the name of who reached out; who expressed the desire to spend time together.

Almost all of the names are "me". This hurt.

There's certainly a handful of exceptions - one particular name crops up almost as often as the "me"s, but almost always it's attached to instances of hanging out as a group, not a desire to spend time with me specifically.

My girlfriend getting up early to drive me into the city, often playing pokemon together on the way, is another common one - although it was much harder to document as there's no written evidence of it. But it occured to me, and that was lovely and made me very happy.

There's a few instances of a couple of friends seeking me out when I'm clearly upset or sad, to offer support. Most frequently, they are the ones who stand firm in the face of my attempts to bluff and self-isolate through my problems (usually a bad idea, as it turns out). This... is lovely. It's been quite essential to keeping me alive recently, if I'm honest.

It also opened the door for a lovely little whisper that's joined the chorus in my subconscious: "You're only lovable when you're sick, Hana."

Not that they EVER intended to give that impression, nor is it at all fucking true. God, I know it's not true. But the whisper stings all the same, logic and truth and reassurances to myself be damned.

All in all, the list did not make me feel good. I sat and thought about this for a while, the voices of my subconscious crowding and brooding and shoving the thoughts around.

One part was all claws and teeth, howling for emotional blood, certain I had revealed the truth and demanding I take action.

Another part sat still and quiet, hoping that I would come up with some evidence, some reasoning, some sudden insight and the ability to go, "Ha! See, we were wrong! Our friends do seek us out and love us!"

I couldn't really come up with anything. Despite my requests in the past, despite the constant reassurances that I am loved, wanted, a necessary part of the group... nobody seemed to seek me out all that often. It's exceedingly rare that someone comes to me, wanting to make plans.

🐝 🐝 🐝

This is roughly when I learned, abruptly and unexpectedly, that my friends were all hanging out without me tonight.

I was very aware that this wasn't a premeditated, intentional act to hurt me - I'm not that bloody blind and self-centred. But of course it did catch me by surprise, and the shock of adrenaline that followed pushed me immediately 50% of the way to a panic attack.

The howling got louder, drowning out everything else. Survival mechanisms from a long time ago kicked into gear: Pretend nothing is wrong, ask the questions as subtly and casually as possible. Play the perfectly composed friend. Do not make this about yourself, do not let them realise that there is a problem, because then you will have two problems. Because then you will be the problem.

All the while, my left hand digs for the jagged knife upon which to justify my pain, just as the right searches desperately for a lifeline, a reason, and explanation that will make this not hurt.

The explanation is obvious of course, and came at once. We'd been talking for a while now about the idea of hanging out in smaller groups, to ease a couple weird social dynamics. (I just didn't expect to be the first one to be cut from the script, although I should have.)

My friends just needed some emotional support, some time together. It's not really about hanging out, not tonight. Not a planned event. Just someone wanting to not be alone for a bit. (Nevermind that I'm just down the road, metaphorically speaking.)

And of course there's some other reasons, ones I won't get into here. Certain activities I've given the impression I'm not comfortable with, certain topics that could be talked about more easily without my presence. That one I struggled to fit, though - it didn't seem particularly relevant at 11:30pm. (But what do I know? I certainly haven't recieved any goodnights yet, at this time of writing.)

This is not about me. I did not need to be included. There would be other times, other opportunities, other messages saying "Hey Hana, can we hang out tonight?"

...if not for already being mid-way through a spiral about something so contrivedly akin to this, it may have even worked. The fact that I came so close to overcoming the shock in the very first instance is a blessing by itself, recently.

And so the spiral deepened.

Still, I sat on my paws and I smothered away the howling of bloody intentions, fighting the urge to isolate, to hurt myself in a hundred different ways, to lash out and hurt others, to be needy and suspicious and demanding.

I think I mostly succeeded, excepting some small part of the last one. I did not abandon all of our shared spaces, I did not injure myself, I did not get up and walk into the night and ignore all messages and pleas.

I thought about it. The voices made demands. I ignored them, and did the smart things.

I messaged one friend, and then another, and then finally another. I put myself in the way of my own desires to self-isolate. There was limited success on this front, of course. It was late, and my friends were all in the one place, busy hanging out, not particularly checking their messages. Still, there was a few replies. There was a few pieces of subtle reassurance obtained. It worked, well enough.

I made compromises, delaying efforts. Rather than give into the hopelessness, the feeling of being surplus immediately, I resolved to wait. I would not storm out noisily while my friends were awake and trying their best to have a good night; I would do it long after they were asleep, and depart when nobody was looking. This gave me time.

I told those howling voices that perhaps they were wrong; look, lets see if anyone goes out of their way to message us. Lets see if anyone says goodnight. Such a simple little thing, surely we aren't truly forgotten?
But if they do not, then you win. We are uncared for, and you were right, and we can retaliate against ourself.

At the time of writing, again, there has still been no goodnight messages. But this gave me time.

And with that time, I went looking. I returned to my earlier musings and lists - when was the last time someone deliberately sought out my company?

The closest I could find was the 5th of March - well over a month ago now. You might be surprised that this did not immediately disappoint me, although I wouldn't blame you for expecting such.

For a moment I was buoyant again - It had happened. Someone had gone out of their way to come see me, without me requesting it or being the one to make the suggestion. This gave me hope.

It only lasted a moment of course, before my subconscious caught up and started mocking me - "A month? A whole month since anyone wanted your company enough to seek it out, Hana?".

But it was an important moment. I clung to it.

I remembered other things - those morning drives with my girlfriend, for one. The other friend who had started developing the motivation to come into the city because I was there, and wanted to see them. They wrote their own blog post about this exact thing, for pitys sake.

Still... it wasn't enough, this time. I thought about my friends without me, visualised it in my mind by accident, and I broke down into tears. I sobbed and sobbed, and some part of me resigned to that thought: It wasn't enough. We aren't enough. In the morning, we would leave. They were all better off without us, and we would enforce this so nobody else had to. Once I finished crying, I would send the messages.

But when I finished crying, and my ugly little heart was hardening over... the bloody voices finally made a mistake.

Determined to hurt me, they bade me go look for one more piece of evidence, one more reason why all this was futile, that we had tried out best! And it would never be enough.

🐝 🐝 🐝

Brief intermission while I realise how long this is getting, write that little note you probably read near the top, and go make myself a cup of tea.

It's 3am. I started at about 1:30am. Is this worth it? We'll find out together, I suppose. It gets a little brighter from here, I promise.

...oh! A goodnight message!! Take that, you bloody creature of howling teeth <3

🐝 🐝 🐝

...I can almost guarantee that none of you will guess where this is going.

In my quest for emotional self-dismemberment, I opened the dms of particular friend.

This person usually lives interstate, although they're visiting us at the moment. This is the third such time since I fell in with this bunch of friends, and each of the three occasions has unfortunately been marked by a new and funnier kind of strife.

Perhaps 60% of that or greater is certainly due to my own mental illness, although I will be a charitible asshole and say that a couple other people in the group could do 20% better too. But this is simply how it goes.

Love is a verb, after all: An action taken; a choice, not a feeling.

This particular visit holds a very deep regret for me. Circumstances have colluded to once again rip apart what should have been an amicable friendship at the very least, far worse than before, right when I believed it was finally on the way to being something meaningful.

One part of that is my own social ineptitude and consistent flakey emotions; perhaps a greater part is the fucking medication that upended my life and made every emotional twinge feel like a knife between my ribs for two weeks. If not for the latter, I do believe the former could have been overcome.

Regardless of the reasons, I fucked up pretty bad, and I have left this person with very little reason to care about me. I have found myself distancing from them more and more, for reasons I can never quite explain but I suspect have a lot to do with every perfectly-tailored piece of trauma I've accumulated, as well as once again a hefty dose of my own stupidity.

But, to get to the point:
I opened their dms, to go looking for evidence that I had done my best. That it was them who never responded to my attempts to bridge the gap, that I was always the one who had to reach out first, that I was the one taking an interest.

Wouldn't you know it. I was wrong.

Not entirely, mind you. I do still hold that they could do 20% better. I'd love if they took more of an interest in what I do, what I have to say, the things I care about; if we are truly going to make this work. But their actions are theirs, and I can't influence them except in the basest ways.

But I was wrong in a most important way, yes. I was not the one who most often initiated conversations.

I scrolled my way back to the start of last month, to March 1st. A day before my birthday, which is an entirely unrelated fact.

And then I skimmed. I looked through, counting each time I was the first one to message or they were.

At first, it was me. This was what I expected.

Then it was them. Then again, and again. By midway through the month, we were fairly even. By the time they arrived here again near the end of the month, I had fallen behind. They were the one reaching out, making an effort.

I remember the latter part of this happening, in hindsight. I remember why. Another friend had joined our little group that month, and I was hopelessly infatuated. The time I spent with everyone else dropped, and this applied most of all to the one of us who was not here in the flesh, and whom I did not always get along with anyway.

(That newest friend is incredibly dear to all of us now, and I hope they stick around for a long long time.)

In any case, there is one more important thing about this discovery... because what I did not remember at all was the quantity and content of our conversations.

For most of March, we were talking every second or third day, proper conversations that would trail on for hours. If you had asked me earlier tonight, I would have grossly underestimated this. I had retconned it in my memory, as I'm so fucking prone to doing, that we were never really close, never really talked.

If they're reading this, I apologise. For that fact and so many others recently. I have been unkind, uncharitable, and a downright fool.

This revelation unexpectedly threw me out of my spiral.

The person in this story from whom I had least expected salvation had provided, without even realising, the evidence I'd been looking for: Once more, someone had repeatedly sought me out. Someone thought my company, my words, my day-to-day existence were all worthwhile.

And so I contemplated this. The grating, braying voices tried to recover, of course, tried to talk me back into my dismay. Why, it doesn't count! for this reason, and that reason, and hey do you notice how I can't remember any of those reasons? because they were stupid reasons.

I stopped waiting. The gambit had paid off. I pulled myself back from the brink.

If we had formed this relationship before, even founded as it was on my somewhat-misguided and overly-optimistic pretenses, then we could do it again, on something more solid this time. I could do this, for my friends.

If I could do that, I could fix everything else. The future is not hopeless.

So I sent my own goodnight messages; not three as usual, but four, one of them with a quiet piece of gratitude attached that I suspect will not really make sense unless they ever read this post.

I resigned myself to probably having to fight off the waves of discomfort again in the morning, but I can do that. I set my online status to Invisible, so that I could see if any goodnights arrived in return, without letting on that I was still awake. A small piece of childish security.

And then I started writing.

🐝 🐝 🐝

I won't be at all surprised if this has made y'all angry (and yes, I am now talking to those particular four friends - apologies if you're anyone else, but thanks for being here!)

Like I said at the start - if this gets read, then I suspect it will be a turning point, but I do not know in which direction. I hope that it explains some things, at least.

I know that if one of y'all wrote this, I would be inclined to immediately forgive any wrongdoing under the weight of my sympathy. But I am not you, nor are you me. I would be wrong to assume that so much kindness is a given.

Still, I want to rebuild things. So I hope. I have been told that I am loved, and so I believe it.

There remains a part of me that is terribly afraid, of course. Intermittently throughout typing this, I have stopped and allowed the musings to return. I have wondered what everyone else is doing, all the way over there without me.

Judging by the lonesome and lovely goodnight message I recieved about 45 minutes ago, I imagine that occurances have, well... occured. Perhaps good things, lovely things, intimate things. Or perhaps long, hard, deep conversations. Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.

This is the thing. I don't know. I don't, can't really know anything.

Solipsism is a hell of a drug.

And here is another thing. If I have made you angry with this, if I am burning through my reserves of goodwill and patience, and there is no further understanding to be fostered... well, I will let the terror speak for a moment.

Do not hesitate to discard us. Do not waste energy any further if you believe this to be a hopeless cause. The soft, gentle way is not always the easier way.

Do it without remorse. Explicitly, and clearly. We're too bloody dense to take a hint. Do not burn yourselves away trying to do this lovingly.

This is what we are most armoured for. This is the battle we have won before. In discarding us, you gift us spite and rage, and they will carry us on to the next thing, and the next. Under harsh reality, we refuse to die. Do not fear our fate.

So yeah, anyway. Sorry about the Royal We and all that. Wouldn't you know my subconscious can be a bit fucking tedious.

All of that is true, and at the same time... I don't believe in it. The howling has quieted. I trust y'all, and I trust the promises that I will not be abandoned this time. If you are angry, tell me, and I will apologise and we will rebuild. I want so badly to believe that we can do anything, together.

I will oscillate on this, of course. The howls and the teeth will grow sharp again.

But I've proven something to myself. I can survive my own fears.

A combination of things (which, to be very clear, were the fault of no-one) came to pass tonight, events and thoughts that hurt me far worse than anything in the weeks previous.

Yet I suffered through it alone, and I won.

I did not need someone to drive me home and dry my tears this time, although I cried and hoped for it. I did not need the long walk in the dark with a friend, to lash out all my anxieties against them. Thank god for that. There's too many regrets trailing behind me already.

Though I hope I will not end up standing alone, I know that I can do so. Self sufficiency is built from leaning on those around you, and these friends have gifted me that much, and more. I hope to repay it still.

🐝 🐝 🐝

I'm getting real fucking sleepy now, and losing track of how I wanted to finish this.

I think the moral of the story, first of all, is that I am recovering. I took care of myself in a way that would have been impossible recently.

Second of all, I think there is a clear request not-so-hidden in all this. I've asked before. Please spend time with me. Please want to spend time with me, as individuals and not just as a group.

Come to me for reassurance and company when you are sad, if you can - not just when I am. I want to help. I want to be useful.

Come to me and ask of my time. Make plans, take up my space, invite yourself into my life. It is the single greatest thing any of you can gift me, right now.

I know your own time and energy is limited. I know you are tired, and disillusioned. I expect this will take time. I do not expect a great storm of requests overnight. But I hope we can return a little to the past, and move a little into the future - piece by piece, when the universe allows.

I hope we watch that TV show together. I hope we finish those movies. I hope we talk more, about crochet and programming languages and maybe some new things. I hope we go driving, just for the sake of it.

I hope I am not the one to propogate all these moments. Already, I appreciate every moment I can remember where I have not had to. I appreciate all the time, reassurance, and words I have been gifted. I still feel I am undeserving, and yet I ask for a little more, because you all tell me I am.

I want to be a part of this family. Not just a hanger-on, afraid at the edges of the pack. I want to build the strength to protect it a little better. I just need a little help, when you can spare it. I hope I do not ask too much, too dramatically.

Do not give something you do not have - but at least let me know that you made it this far, if you can. That will matter to me. And I will wait, and do what I can in the meantime.

I'm going to wrap up here - this damn thing is already so way way far too long.

At 4:49am, with things to do tomorrow, unsure if I will regret any or all or none of this.

The show must go on. The play's the thing. There is opportunity waiting in the wings.

Tomorrow I'm gonna write about music.

Goodnight, dearest everypuppy and darling kittycat and everybody else along for the ride. Y'all are loved.

Sweet dreams 💜