I am very sorry to hear about the loss of your close family member. I hope you are okay. I can imagine it was tough losing them and losing connection with the person your heart yearned for in quick succession, just when you needed someone the most. You sound very compassionate knowing you can not expect them to be there to heal the complete loss, whilst at the same time your heart kind of wants them to be to.

I don’t have any words to say that could make it better. My thought is that this person you were talking to on social media won’t have forgotten you even if the posts look that way, although when I feel in a sad cycle it feels that they could of foregotten way, but rationally that is not true. I can understand and empathise how reaching out to someone on social media especially if you work together can lead to emotional closeness quickly and how you would crave that after having non available parents. I struggle with wanting that emotional closeness too, so when you feel like you have found it, your heart is like YES! I want more of this. Which makes the not talking and emotional distance hard to bear.

Do you still both work for the same company? Did you hear anything back after you sent the email? In terms of people you pursued in the past do you mean people who were attached already or were not available? In my own past I have felt a need to get people to ‘like me’ even if they were not interested at all. In fact in some ways if they weren’t interested it felt more like a challenge. That sounds really stupid and like I like playing games but at the time it would not be a conscious thought, only now when I look back I see the need to be liked by those men. I always seem to go for a type of man too eg physical type and also emotional type. This is me thinking out loud but I once knew a child as part of some work experience I was doing who had a series of x”dad’s” in her life and did not feel loved by any of them nor her biological dad. This child built up a strong bond and attachment to one of my male colleagues, almost instantly. She would follow him around, hug him, cling to him and would struggle to calm down if it wasn’t for him talking to her. With everyone else she was more distant but with him she would be very open. I saw, from seeing that experience, how she saw him as “safe” and so opened up to him and also how I tend to do that with people- it tends to be men, that look a certain way and act a certain way. It is like I feel they have the “key” to me and so I trust them to be myself around and with my thoughts. With everyone else I rarely talk about my thoughts and defo not to my parents. I don’t know how to not want to do this- although I am more conscious of this as a weakness- or whether “chemistry” is like that experience- of trust without knowing why and the thought they meet something inside of us. Have you ever had that kind of experience?