Can I get a connection?
Thursday, March 12, 2026 8:24 PM PDT
Seattle, WA
Another one of those 20-minute blog posts. I have not wanted to create anything, but I’ve gotten so bored of the Internet that what else can I do? I might as well pull out my computer if I don’t want to study.
I’m a very busy person: I am taking a full load of classes this quarter—17 credits of mostly physics and astronomy, plus one political science class. And now it’s dead week so any free time I had has been devoted to rapidly finishing assignments and turning things in. I had two big presentations today. They went well, thanks to all of you who did not ask.
The first presentation was over our work for a whole quarter, and it was great except we went a little over time, so I had to cut my last part on conclusions. But it’s the type of class where the hard part is doing the work, not getting the grade, so I’m not too worried. The second was demonstrating a late-night interview of the types of stars I made for my final project in Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology, a class that has way more of the former than latter. I am really proud of my work, I think it was very funny and I keep rewatching it and smiling. But I didn’t enjoy awkwardly standing while people I barely knew watched some of it, knowing it was seven minutes, so I had to find a time to tell them it’s okay if they don’t watch the whole thing. It was also a very loud room, which I didn’t quite account for, so most people couldn’t really hear it. But I sent the link to some of my friends to critical acclaim. (Thanks, guy with the hair—you know who you are.)
That actually wasn’t what I wanted to write about, it just slipped out. So one reason that I haven’t hung out with my friends is that I’m definitely too busy. At the end of some days, like today, I don’t want to interact with other people. I want to sit at home and be calm and silent. But I’m not that busy, especially if you’re me and think you don’t do much at all.
The main reason is that I feel disconnected from certain people. One person in particular I became friends with around this time last year, after not really speaking to them in the first quarter. (This timeline is true for most of my “great friends” actually, so I hope they remain anonymous.) And fall quarter I thought we were even best friends. They would often text me asking to hang out, and I often feel like I’m the only one who does that, so it would make me really happy to feel noticed and appreciated. We’d text back and forth endlessly, and they would reply really quickly, and we were just on the same wavelength.
I don’t know how long this has been going on, but I definitely feel disconnected from them lately. I noticed we never talk and that when I do text them, what was hours between responses has turned into multiple days. I know that it’s so childish to care about response times as reflective of a relationship, and with another friend I wouldn’t consider this a signal at all, but this person is different. I first noticed this a little over a month ago, and it’s made me pretty sad but also just confused about what happened—because it was nothing bad.
No drama, no arguments, just sudden silence. I don’t even know if they noticed. And I wonder if this is how most relationships end: all of a sudden, you’re just not where you started.
Speaking of silence, I turned off the music while I write just now. I am trying to only do one thing at once because I feel like all of the constant input is making me slowly more overwhelmed and less good at paying attention to the world around me.
It’s not like this has never happened to me before. When I first moved away from my childhood town, I would still keep up well with my old friends. It felt one-sided, and that made me feel rather unappreciated, but they would reply. Over time, I had less and less things to tell them. I no longer talk to someone I considered my best friend four years ago, and that is kind of sad. We met in a recent trip back to my hometown, and I thought they had changed, but now I’m thinking that maybe they thought the same about me.
I should address this with the friend now, if I want to put the effort in to make our relationship better, because all of them always need work. But I don’t know that I want to. Even looking at the rest of the people I thought were my friends, they still are, but I just have nothing to tell them or talk to them about. One person underwent a rather major life change and didn’t tell me, and it hadn’t been that long, but I still wanted to know. (For the record, they did nothing wrong by not telling me. It’s one of those things where we are both right and neither of us are.)
It made me think about whether they see me the way I see them, and maybe that’s my fault for not spending enough time with them, or is it some other aspect of my personality, or is it just what happens as you grow older and walk through life together and apart?
Maybe this will change next quarter, maybe I will see them more, and I hope I do. But for what? Ironically, I feel one of the best connections to someone right now who is the least likely guess for that. I am lucky that the person I’d consider my best friend is still that, that we are two sides of the same coin, that every time I hang out with them, I feel unbelievably happy because we just get along so well. But the rest of the people I thought I liked? Did I even feel that way at all?
This is definitely a more personal blog post, and so I will probably edit it now that I have about 90 seconds left to remove some of the more sensitive parts. But, actually, what is the point? Isn’t to be human to experience a whole range of very intense emotions? I think so.
This helped me get “my groove” back, I think, even in a very very small way. But I often think of my life as a series of on and off periods where maybe they are all just the same period. So maybe this isn’t getting back what I never lost.
The interesting thing here is that I tie in my self-worth (added 10 more minutes) to whether other people want to put effort into our relationship. Are they texting me first? Do they remember things about me, make plans, send me funny things? Some of them, yes, and they do it in very meaningful and appreciated manners. The rest of them… not really. I remember their birthdays, and send them handwritten cards in the mail if I can, but they don’t remember mine. I call them when they break up with their boyfriends. Not to be self-righteous, because I know I am not a perfect friend. Sometimes I yap a lot, as I said I can be absent in social hangouts, maybe I am missing the struggles that they need me for. But at some point you have to recognize the standards you hold yourself to, and see whether the people in your life are living up to them. (This can also serve as a metric for whether these standards are healthy. I think in this case they are, but sometimes they are not.)
I also want to note that I do have other friends. I have especially this year made some wonderful friends in the physics and astronomy departments, people that I can laugh with in great joy, that I’d consider very close friends. But I started college with these other people. We spent so many hours together, some of us live together, now some of us are dating each other. We’ve lived our undergraduate lives together up until this point, and now it feels like I no longer recognize that. They still hang out, and I am always invited, but I don’t go. Two things can be true: you recognize that many people in your life are wonderful, but you were hoping others would do better too.
My mom would say that young people are just like this, that I am the exception (again, not in a high-ground way—just saying to be gentle on other people), but I at least hope that these people are doing what I do for them to other people, and that I am just hurting for all my valid and less valid reasons.
In this realm, I do acknowledge there are two people in my life that I do not do a good job of this with. One recently asked me to dinner, but I do not like them too much as a person. Entire hours of thought have been devoted to understanding this person and their often rude actions, especially towards me. So I think that is justifiable. But another person, we just totally lost touch. We were friends, and now we are not, but I don’t actually miss their company. I am conflicted because this person wants to hang out with me, but I worry that I would be doing so in bad faith because I don’t actually like them. They don’t make me feel better about myself and I would be pretending to be someone I am not if I do spend time with them. The other person though, I should at least ask how they are.
Hmm. Can I get a connection? (Shoutout to the OneRepublic song.)