cliques, my heart, God, etc.

I feel very isolated and alone today. I’m disenchanted with college life, and done being hurt by cliques. I don’t know how my freshman zeal and my sophomore year RA job and intense relationship managed to protect me from this feeling, but I am raw now. Exclusion is an ugly thing. To see a table where once I felt welcome -- now I just don’t want to expend the emotional energy required to burst through the barrier, knowing that I am ultimately unnecessary to them. As a “savior complex” person, this wounds my pride, of course. But at the heart of it, it is terrible to feel unwanted where once I felt wanted. It is confusing and hurtful.

Being ignored is also not very savory. People I have held, breaking, in my arms, people I have seen raging and crying and swearing, people I have seen at their worst, do not look me in the eye when I pass them on the sidewalk. Not anymore. I have nothing else to offer them but to mirror their embarrassment and offer hesitant love as we acknowledge what has transpired between us -- I was there for you when you didn't have anyone else. Now I am invisible, and it stings.

This is not open rejection. It is the absence of acceptance and inclusion. It’s fundamentally different, but feels very much the same.

I wonder often in those stinging moments whether I will have left a legacy here at all.

What happened? Did I get meaner and more open and opinionated? Or did I just grow up? Do I suck at initiating things? Am I a terrible friend? Did I lose my fearlessness and boldness? Or does it just not matter anymore to be friends with as many people as I used to?

Why are people both the cause of my greatest happinesses and greatest letdowns and heartbreaks?

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I miss feeling like I was welcome anywhere. The groups around me are getting crustier and harder. I no longer want those relationships, because I have been taught that they are impossible. But I miss feeling included, and feeling like the people around me were open doors and not closed.

Seeing acquaintances or old friends comfortably cocooned in friend groups that I am now not a part of is definitely a sharp punch to my gut. In the moments I walk into the SAC or the cafeteria, on my worst days like today, I am gripped with a sense of longing and disgust with myself for feeling it. Why is it so important to me, still, after all these years, to have a “group” to hang out with on Friday nights, get dinners with, and have weeks at the beach with over the summer?

Part of me believes that is social nirvana and I will never be happy until I find it.

But part of me knows that having a little group is not what I was specifically created for.

Maybe I am born to be a wanderer and a floater. I have been for most of my life, except for those little moments on my halls that we've formed something that felt like a group. I feel so scattered now. Maybe that’s how I can love people for the rest of my life, by being inclusive, because my friend group is myself plus anyone and everyone.

Or maybe I’m just not very patient with being loyal, because I’ve never taught that love equals loyalty. Love is something higher than that. And loyalty can be very self-serving, too. Or codependent.

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I guess what I’m trying to say is, I don’t belong here anymore, and I don’t know if I ever really did, honestly.

And I’m terrified that it’s my independence thing. You know, how I don’t want men to get close to me and how I want to do my own whatever all the time. That thing I am praying that I can actively grow out of.

I wonder sometimes if I’m any fun to be around at all. I know I’m funny and brash and whatever, but why do I feel less wanted than I did freshman year? I wonder if I was just fooling myself then about how well-liked I was, because I’m not very good about living life alongside others patiently. I might be being too hard on myself, because this is college, and none of us really have any common goals, except survival and graduation. But still.

After graduation, I will be very glad to not see many of the faces I see daily – relationships I feel I have no power or time to deepen, relationships I feel are broken and can’t be fixed, relationships I am tired of pretending are working. This is life. I know it is. Friendships fade and explode, people lose interest or circumstances change, contexts disappear, people grow. I’m alright with that. But I will be so, so glad not to have to be reminded of this every day.

It’s time to move on. I’m definitely not loyal. I’m done here. What a mercy to graduate a year early and not have to wrestle through this pointlessly for another year. If loyalty is something I need to learn, it probably isn’t going to happen here.

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I am grasping for contentment. I am listening for the Spirit inside of me when I sit in the library alone and feel like bursting into tears -- that only happened once, and it was tonight. But it was an intense feeling: the fear of being alone forever. Sitting across two close friends who are dating in HAL amplifies this fear now. Holy Spirit, please, tell me how to listen. Tell me how to be a friend. Tell me how to trust in the Lord when I feel like a relational failure. Teach me that you are the best friend I will always have. Teach me that You are the greatest happiness I can ever have.

It’s incredibly ironic – most spiritual things are – that the one thing I long for in all these lonely moments is the precise thing that most terrifies me in the world, which is being fully known and loved.

Thankfully I have a God that does know and love me more than anyone else ever could, who digs deep into the basements of my heart and carefully tends to every painful crack, fissure and leak. He has made safe each of these secret rooms within me that I am frightened to unlock. He is there and He is present. He is gently sweeping up the damage done to me by others so that I can welcome them in again with strength that does not belong to me.

God, make my heart a welcome place for my enemies. Beat the dust out of my porch mat and open the door wide. Let my friends belong there, held in your love for them that I could never supply on my own. I want to invite others into your love, not into my fear.

My heart is aching today. It is because I do not feel like I belong anywhere. But I do belong in the love God has for me. He cares about each of the people who ignore me and hurt me. He cares about every wonderful, great friend I have. He loves them equally. (God, teach me to love equally!) He cares about groups and floaters, and He will use all of us according to His purpose and plan, uniquely, specifically and perfectly.

I do believe that now.

And it is what I want to believe when I walk into the cafeteria.