Styna recently said that they would only feel safe and comfortable in a relationship with someone who is as isolated as they have been during the continuing COVID pandemic.
After I had processed that, I looked at my own life. I go to a lot of movies, we eat out, I have gone to appointments in-person, and I have visited some family every once in a while. Styna never believed that I love her/them, but all this time I have wanted to be with them; I have been going through myself the past week or so, pushing, thinking about these things while wanting to push through how to negate these everyday non-isolated activities for them.
Seeing family feels like an obligation, and my mom has told me in the past that I AM going to see them; the ones I have pushed to see every great once in a while are my last set of grandparents, one who is in a nursing home with dementia and Parkinson's. For food, we typically don't have much at home but the same things over and over, and if my mom is tired we go out to one of our favorite places to eat. I don't know yet if my appointments can be over the phone or through video conference, and if so if they will let me unless I lie about how I can't be at any of the places in person.
So, two of the four types of activities come down to formalities. The food and movies have to do with engrained things, the former by a form of formality that became a desired thing. Despite how there are different issues to consider, my mind goes back to how often I go to movies. Movies are a passion and hobby; they don't require me to go to the theater, I watch plenty of movies at home too, yet going to movies has always been an important thing to me since I was little, and beside from snuggling with my cat or sleeping, going to the movies also became an outlet to get away from home situations and family dynamics and anxiety/stress. Then, over the past year, young adults/late teenage employees at the theater have become familiar with me and started socializing a little in person, plus some stuff on film social media site Letterboxd. It's not intimate, but it's something that I haven't been used to in my life since the days when I was the head of a Disqus community; there's a friendly thing to it that I have also experienced at a few of the restaurants I have frequented due to waiters recognizing us. For the theater, it's also a social thing, even if it's not every time, and even though it's brief.
I also thought about how I could ever get a job if I'm isolated; I searched for remote jobs on Indeed, and the current ones in my area required experience and years of schooling in different fields that I don't have. What there is for me and my future I haven't figured out yet.
So I layed these things out, and though getting through the expulsion of some of these things would be rough, the urge to be with Styna and somehow get through my feelings toward these other things so I could have and be there for her is with me too. Then...something sometimes hits me, the pain of how they don't have the same feelings for me, and all these years where I have felt things for them plus been spinning in wheels through life because of one thing after another and never seeming to advance in anything. It's like, since my preteen years forward, inside I have felt isolated, and whenever something develops I am put back where I was, with the loss in its place. With Styna, I have kept feeling like this is it, this is the connection, I know it is, but...it's always dangling, and if I pay enough attention to Styna's detachment from me, I feel more cut off from the world. Then with the hope of Styna, things start getting brighter, then I think about how getting my hopes up leads to getting hurt. As my other expectations and goals for the future fell over the years and I haven't been able to find a way to get up, my love for Styna and the thought of being with Styna remained. There are these things in my daily life I cling to, and then there is the hope for a better day someday, even though I don't know if it will ever come.