Maybe I Just Want to Be Seen

Maybe it's my deepest desire to be seen and heard by at least one person at all times. That might be why I feel a strange hollowness whenever I pass a group of people laughing together, easy with each other in a way that looks effortless, the kind that seems to have been forged by years of friendship. I talk to plenty of people at university - small talk, group projects, passing hellos - but none of it has settled into the kind of circle I used to have.

It sounds ungrateful when I put it that way. I do have a friend group from school, people I've known for years. But even that has started to feel like drifting. Everyone's scattered now - some in university, some working, all of us buried in our own version of "Sorry bro I have work to do, maybe another day?". We don't talk as often as we used to, and when we do, it's catching up rather than living life together in that moment and making memories for years to come. Out of that group, there are two people I still consider my closest of kin, the ones I can call without warning and pick up exactly where we left off. I'm lucky to have that. I know I am.

But knowing I'm lucky doesn't erase the wanting for that kind of belonging. I've sat with this feeling long enough to notice a pattern: I don't just want a friend, I want that specific bond again - the kind that forms without effort, the kind you fall into rather than build. And I think I've been foolishly expecting university to hand that to me the way school once did, like it's owed to me simply because it happened before.

That's probably the naive part, I think. Life doesn't repeat its good old days on command. The friendships I had took years, proximity, and a thousand sharded ordinary moments to become what they were. But I was young and foolish enough back then to notice the years of effort that went into it, overlooking the process and jumping straight into the end result. Expecting an Eight-month university acquaintance to feel the same is asking time to move faster than it does.

So, here's where I've landed, at least for now: I think I need to stop making this an open case file in my head, regularly comparing past evidence and the reality. Not because the wanting is wrong, but because turning it over and over in my mind doesn't get me any closer to having it - it just makes the hollowness louder. Hoping for a close circle at university is fine. Auditing my social life every day to check if it's arrived yet is draining my energy more than assignments do.

What I can actually do is simpler than what I've been chasing: show up well for the people already in front of me. Talk to my current friends on a good, honest level instead of measuring them against a standard from the past. Let a real circle form in its own time, if it's going to, instead of trying to get one into existence out of the sounds of silence.

And in the meantime, redirect some of this energy - back to my studies and extracurriculars. Not as a distraction from the wanting, but because life doesn't have to pause and wait for one part of it to resolve before the rest of it gets to move forward.