Dear June, the pandemic turned me into a recluse

"I found it impossible to adjust back to normal life, even all these years later.”

Dear June,

“I’m in my twenties and have no friends. I live with my partner and see my family often, but lack female friendships. I used to have many, but the pandemic turned me into a recluse, and I found it impossible to adjust back to normal life, even all these years later.”

This writer gave consent for their message to be shared and responded to publicly.

Dear friend,

I think I speak for so many when I tell you that you are far from alone in this experience. I have even written about how my inner recluse, too, enjoyed the solidarity and the minimal expectations for existing as a social creature in this world that the pandemic time had to offer.

And, without judgment (to whatever degree is available to you), I invite you to consider what this time did for you as well.

The loss of friendships can come from many things, hopefully most of which require no blame. It can be a simple parting of the ways from a friendship formed by circumstance, and when circumstances change, the camaraderie and necessity that formed your connection change, too.

Or perhaps these friendships were formed by earlier versions of you. A different you who defined friendship and its role in your being as something that may no longer align with the you who went through and now lives on following the pandemic.

Curiosity is crucial here. Curiosity invites possibility and insight without the need for protection by judgment and criticism.

I am curious about you…

What role have friends played in your life?

What kind of friend do you long to be?

What makes you feel safe and seen in relationships?

Can you picture it? Can you picture her, your first new friend?

Can you then poke holes in her because we must also give grace to the fallibility of our fellow humans? No one is as perfect in reality as they are in our mind’s eye.

What flaws do your future female friends possess that you hope to love them for?

What might you do together? Become together?

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I might invite you to start with the question:

What are you making the lack of female friendships and your experience of a post-pandemic reality mean about you, your life, your capabilities, and your worth today?

The meanings we apply to our current situations are potent and instructive. It becomes very difficult to separate the feelings they evoke from the fears they protect us from. Like looking through distorted glass and not pausing to wonder why everything looks wrong.

There are no concrete answers to who we are and what we need. The truth that lingers in the contemplation of these questions ebbs and flows with time and our shifting capacity to simply be in the present with all that we like and dislike in our lives and of ourselves.

And beyond the question-and-answer schema, these queries may look like what they do when written out above; they are, at their core, an offering, a mirror. A gateway to revealing your truest self.

You have love in your life. It’s important to remember this is proof that you are lovable.

You have cultivated friendships in the past. Proof, once again, that the capacity remains within you.

You also, as we all did, lived through something traumatic for several years. Though the world may have trudged along in the wake of a worldwide lockdown and the death toll it incurred, doesn’t mean our nervous systems have moved on in lock step.

If you are not yet recovered from this, that is okay. Let it be okay. Let it take time.

Your recluse state is likely a means of protection, derived from both body and mind, to help you survive.

Thank yourself for this.

Love yourself for this.

Nurture and tend to your life in a way that reveals to your body that survival is not the primary objective anymore. Listen to its signals and respond with kindness. Lean into certainty where you can find it, and lean into trust and faith in yourself when you cannot.

You can and will, over time, show your body and soul that it is time again to reopen the doors, to remove the mask, and rejoin the world in whatever manner calls to your spirit.

But baby steps, my friend, you have all of the time in the world with which to exercise this newfound curiosity and hope.

with gratitude,

-June

I invite you to stay and be seen here.

for words with nowhere else to go

unspoken thoughts, unfinished feelings, & everything in between

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