Dear Anita,

Before I wrote here this morning, I serendipitously, stumbled upon this clip from the Matthias Barker podcast via TikTok, and heard this quote by John Mark Comer:

As long as you live in the prison of where you have to get what you want to be happy, no person, no marriage, no job, no life, no identity, no sexual experience, no income bracket, no travel experience, no passport. Fill in the blank. Nothing will ever be able to always give what you want, and you will run over people. Sabotage people. People will become objects by which you try to self-gratify and feed your narcissism. Even if it masquerades as ‘I’m falling in love. Or this is great. I love these people!’

His words hit me hard due to their accuracy. This was often how I spent my life: Trying to find people or experiences to fill the void inside me. While I didn’t want to believe that I was narcissistic, I realized in the last few years that narcissism was a core trait. This may have partially originated from the distance my mother kept with me, which may have fed into my feelings of low self-esteem as I grew. (Low self-esteem was something I worked hard to overcome, and it wasn’t until my late 30s that I finally felt that I had a handle on it.)

I feel this quest for happiness—and my work in therapy last year to work on connecting and being vulnerable around people—made for the relationship with my coworker friend to be more stressful than it should have been. As I’ve written, perhaps I jumped in too far too soon without understanding the nature of the relationship? Perhaps I forced things (e.g., the kiss on the first date, the cabin, the little gifts, etc.) without appreciating that she was solely focused on her growth and evolution since her divorce and recovery from her eating disorder? Perhaps I imagined something there—that “connection”—when there truly was not one?

I haven’t heard from my coworker friend since the days before she left for her trip. She returns today and I imagine I won’t hear from her until we return to work in the morning. While I don’t embrace social media as many others do, we are “Facebook friends,” and she has not posted there since before she left. I believe she needed a break from life here and just wanted to focus on her time there with her best friend.

Her time away was good for me too. The physical distance between us allowed me to divest a bit from the relationship. Something had changed in her since we returned from the cabin. Yes, there her explicit declaration that there would be no “long term relationship,” and that anything physical would extend only as far as hugging. However, there was an emotional retraction as well. She would not text unless it was something work-related or something that concerned her, and the week before she left was the really first week we had not hung out since we began hanging out in mid-November.

I may be wrong, but I feel like she may have felt the beginnings of something for me but cast those feelings aside to be practical or to protect herself. She may enjoy my company and like me as a person but does not see a chance at a long-term relationship and doesn’t want to put her heart through the pain of another relationship that will not go the distance. The long embrace as she was leaving after dinner here (the night of her Pap screen) may have been her way of saying both thank you and goodbye, as we have not hung out since. I don’t know. I enjoyed our time together, as I think she did too, but perhaps she needed to take a step back.

I guess the point of writing today is to say that her week away has given me a chance to reflect and reframe things. While a part of me does hope that we can remain friends, and possibly grow closer as friends, I need to continue to focus on moving somewhere else and finally putting down roots.

I am happy to have met her when I did, as someone else may have been seeking a companion, which I don’t know if I’m ready for that. Yes, companionship would be fantastic, but can I be a good partner while I’m still seeking my place in the world? This person, as I believe my coworker did, would feel my narcissism and I could sabotage the relationship as I often did in the past. My coworker friend is beautiful, intelligent, driven, and many other positive qualities that fed me. And while I overlooked her negative qualities, I may have sacrificed too much of myself at the chance of a relationship with her. Especially if/when sex may have become involved and muddied the waters.

She mentioned in our FaceTime chat the Friday before she left that she had plans to quit her second job now that she has received a pay raise and paid off her debts. That her second job exhausts her and leaves her with little free time—especially now with Spring right around the corner. That working in a brewery causes her to drink too much, and as I wrote here before, the nature of the foodservice industry gives her access to marijuana. The text from her I shared here before:

I haven’t been really partaking much – I don’t like the people I have to get it from. They creep me out. Oh, the joys of being female 🥲 and the joys of suppressing something that doesn’t need to be suppressed so it gets pumped in with unsavory characters.

At least for me, there was an unusual connection to her, and I’d like to see her live a cleaner life and live up to the potential I see in her. I wish that we could have gotten to know each other better and grown closer and maybe we will. Or maybe we won’t and that is okay too. I need to continue to work on myself before I jump in with someone.