Dear nycartist:

Happy belated 40th birthday! The first time we communicated was in March 2019, you were 36 at the time. I feel like I almost know you for a few years!

I am sorry that your birthday plans ended with a disappointment when friends did not show up to your celebration, one didn’t even respond to your invitation. It felt “like the chapter of my former life and circles of friends is truly closed“, you wrote. I took some time today re-reading our previous communication, and I think that it’s a good thing to close part of this chapter because out of your 12 threads, 7 were about friendships that troubled and upset you..  so better close the upsetting part.

You wrote previously: “My family is very small. I’m an only child… I come from a very toxic and broken family“- and your childhood was indeed very, very difficult. At one point you shared that you thought of yourself as a warrior because of what you went through and survived. Indeed you are a warrior!

It seems like you tried to make up for having a small and troubled family life by having a lot of friends and having good relationships with them, with partial success and quite a bit of upset.

You wrote today: “I just feel very ‘forgotten’ and it really is upsetting to me“- this makes me think about how forgotten you really were by your mother growing up: “She wanted to be a single woman with friends and go out and be a girl in her 20’s, which left me staying with my grandmother very often, or sleepovers at friends’ houses. Then when I was 6 she married my stepdad, but before that she had some really horrific boyfriends… Then she went into a sort of hibernation…for several years of my life, everyone was in their own room. She would hide in her bedroom reading, I would be in my room playing games or watching TV”.

Your mother chose dating and men over you, then she chose being alone in her bedroom over you… so I can see how it hurts you most recently when some of your friends chose to be elsewhere during your birthday celebration.

Previously: “When my mother left this man, I was about to go to college. Once I left I NEVER came back to live with my mom again. But since she and that third man broke up, she’s been trying to make up for all the times in my life she didn’t choose me“- to not be chosen by your own mother is painful. I know the feeling of being … unchosen. Problem is that you needed her to choose you when you were growing up, she had a time-limit to make you feel chosen.

She can’t make it up to you when you are an adult for what she didn’t give you when you were a child, not any more than you can make up for a family you didn’t have by having a… big family of friends as an adult.

You ended your original post today with: “A good friend who came said something to me that night, she said her therapist told her ‘nostalgia is a form of depression’, which I had never thought about. Perhaps me holding on to those old friendships is negative in some way. It is definitely not bringing me joy as I enter this new decade. I feel very sad, uncared for and lonely (despite my having a wonderful husband, and daughter, I just mean with regard to friends)”-

– I think that feeling “very sad, uncared for and lonely” is what you felt growing up, an emotional experience that is still happening because people re-experience painful thoughts & emotions of childhood all the way into and through adulthood, regardless of new circumstances (a wonderful husband and daughter).

I think that it is time to fully mourn the family that you did not have, so that you can leave it (it being the continued emotional experience of this Lack, of Longing for what you didn’t have) in the past and no longer try to re-create it through friendships. When that happens, friends will not carry this heavy weight in your life, they wouldn’t matter this much.

anita