I was looking for a friend. That feels important to say first, because in retrospect I think I spent a lot of time trying to understand what happened without acknowledging what I had been looking for when it began. Not sex, primarily. Not romance. Not somebody to save me. A friend. Someone creative. Someone strange in compatible ways. Someone who wanted to talk about poems and art and the messy work of making things. Someone who might look at what I created and see more than a hobby or an affectation.
Then I met someone who seemed almost suspiciously designed to fill that space. He was creative. Energetic. Intensely enthusiastic. He talked about art as though it were oxygen. He took an interest in my poetry. He told me he believed in me. And I wanted very badly for that to be true. So I did what empathetic people sometimes do when we encounter contradictions in someone we care about: I translated. Arrogance became confidence. Self importance became eccentricity. A strange relationship with the truth became storytelling. An inability to accept criticism became artistic conviction. Cruelty became neurodivergence, trauma, misunderstanding, a bad day, anything that allowed me to preserve the version of the person I thought I had met.
There were stories that did not quite add up. There were accomplishments presented with enormous confidence that seemed considerably less impressive when examined closely. At one point, I was shown evidence of an academic credential that struck me as deeply questionable, complete with the kinds of identifiers and documentation meant to make the whole thing look official. The presentation was elaborate. The underlying claim was much less convincing. And that should have mattered more to me than it did.
There was also a recurring mythology about other people. People disappeared. People ghosted him. People could not handle him. People were intimidated by his creativity, his personality, his energy. He seemed genuinely wounded by this pattern, and because I am who I am, I sympathized. I wanted to be different. I wanted to be the person who did not abandon someone simply because they were complicated. What I failed to consider was the possibility that when the same ending keeps happening, the explanation might not always be that everyone else is intimidated. Sometimes people leave because eventually they see something. I just had not seen it yet. Or maybe I had.
There had been moments when empathy seemed conspicuously absent, particularly when I was the one who needed it. But those were easy to negotiate with myself. Maybe I had not explained myself properly. Maybe he did not understand. Maybe his brain worked differently. Maybe I was expecting too much. I could rationalize a lack of empathy when I was its target. Then a woman dropped a mason jar at a farmers market.
Glass shattered across the ground. She was already embarrassed, the way people become embarrassed when something ordinary happens loudly in public and suddenly strangers are looking at them. And beside me came a response so casually cruel that something inside me changed. There was not a debate. There was not enough time to construct another sympathetic explanation. I saw a stranger having a vulnerable human moment. He saw someone to ridicule. And suddenly all of my translations stopped working.
Once that happened, I started looking backward without the benefit of the mythology I had been protecting. The grandiosity looked different. The stories looked different. The questionable claims looked different. The constant need to be admired looked different. Even the interest in my art looked different. That part hurt the most, because I had believed that I had finally found someone who saw the strange little world inside me and thought it had value. Someone who understood why I write. Someone who believed there was something worth nurturing there. And there was another realization I did not particularly enjoy having. Attention is not the same thing as appreciation. Desire is not the same thing as intimacy. Someone being fascinated by you does not necessarily mean they respect you. And being fetishized can feel remarkably similar to being seen when you desperately want to be seen.
That distinction became impossible to ignore. There is a particular grief in discovering that a friendship may have existed much more fully in your understanding of it than in the other person’s. You do not just lose the person. You lose the story you had constructed around them. The conversations acquire new meanings. The compliments sound different. Memories that once felt warm develop strange shadows. You find yourself mentally reopening evidence you had already filed away because the verdict changed.
And then there is embarrassment. How did I not see this? Why did I excuse that? Why did I give so much? Why did I keep explaining behavior that I would have immediately recognized as unacceptable if it were happening to someone I loved? But that last question contains its own answer. Empathy is a strange gift. It allows us to see complexity where other people might see only behavior. It lets us imagine the wounds behind someone’s defenses. It makes forgiveness possible. It also makes an excellent crowbar for someone who learns where to place it. Eventually empathy has to include yourself. Mine finally did.
I do not think everyone who enters our lives badly enters them uselessly. Sometimes the lesson is simply that creativity does not equal character. Intensity does not equal intimacy. Confidence does not equal truth. And someone telling you that everybody eventually leaves them is not always a request for you to prove that you are different. Sometimes it is information. I went looking for a friend. For a while, I thought I had found one. What I actually found was a much harder lesson about the distance between being admired, being desired, and being known.
But I also learned something worth keeping. I learned that wanting connection does not mean I have to override myself to get it. I learned that empathy should not require me to argue with my own instincts. I learned that when something feels wrong, I do not need a courtroom level case before I am allowed to pay attention to that feeling. And I am still going to look for friends. I am still going to trust people. I am still going to be open to strange, creative, complicated humans. I do not want this experience to turn me suspicious or closed off, because that would give it more power than it deserves. The difference is that next time, I am going to listen when my gut starts speaking. I can be generous without being gullible. I can be empathetic without explaining away everything. I can give people room to be imperfect without convincing myself that every warning sign is simply another thing I should understand better. I am still looking for friendship. I am just no longer willing to lose myself in the search for it.
Chestnut Cowboy 