That time by myself, and breaking up with him, were the best decisions I ever made. I had to stay with a friend for a while as my life was falling apart, luckily he only charged me $300 rent and I was on EI after getting fired from my job at the time for not performing (I was mega fucked up emotionally by all of this relationship stuff), so I was able to survive, still trashed my credit though.

After that year, I moved to a new city, took a new job, and intentionally stayed single. I singlemaxxed. I rented a nice little apartment 15 minutes from downtown and yes it was noisy and no there was no bedroom window and yes I survived off of ready made grocery store food, but I was happy. I worked and then came home and played video games. I was confident, I was able to be out and about and around people, to take care of myself no problem. I didn't get up to much but that was okay, great even. I remember the first night in this brand new apartment, none of my stuff was there yet and so I basically slept on the carpeted floor. I was playing some silly game on a rented gaming VM (the only time I ever Cloud Gamed!) because my PC was still at the old place.

I didn't even really have any friends when I moved to this town, actually, either. No one I was really close to - it turns out it was okay there too. Nowadays I've been in kind of a rut where I am not feeling like myself, and I just have to wonder "what changed?" The office is a ghost town now (not that I ever go into it) and most of my work conversations are now well, about work. Most of the unserious people that I liked are now gone from the company and there's no opportunities to get to know anyone, really.

In the beginning, I was writing thousands of lines of code a week, productionizing a whole bunch of POC code, was solely responsible for a huge complicated system, eventually started helping with planning stuff etc. My colleagues told me to "write less code" oops. I was doing great, everything was working out for me and it didn't really feel like a struggle, somehow everything was in balance for me and my life was great, despite most of my social things just being work stuff. This was the FIRST TIME in my entire fucking life where I really felt like people were happy with my work, and where I was able to show up on time and leave on time and stay focused etc.

Eventually I started befriending people at work, we'd play games over lunch, it was lively and wonderful. I was so social, you wouldn't believe! Even though I clearly still had some rough edges people were decent to me ... I felt safe and like people genuinely enjoyed my company, which was such a good feeling. I started to arrange game nights and the group was large, and it was great. I nailed the social stuff.

I met my now partner 2 weeks into the job, but we really only started dating a year later after becoming friends, playing music together, etc., when one day it just kinda hit me that I liked him, like the feeling just came out of nowhere. And we started hanging out more seriously.

The rest is history, but I am in a reflective mood today and am thinking about relationships and quadrants and my needs from people and wondering if I'm really as incompetent as I think I am at any of this? I think that I should maybe be a little proud of myself. Knowing I was going to be okay on my own grew me up so much and I think that it built a confidence in me that I should rely on more often. I feel like, if I focus on that feeling, I can finally have those difficult conversations where I advocate for myself and put all of my relationships at risk, because I know that even if I end up alone over it, that I'll be okay and that there's peace in being alone - its a much better feeling than being in relationships that I'm not happy with.

Things are quiet here (well not literally right now someone is banging on our roof and is telling us we need to get the whole thing replaced soon which isn't much of a surprise BUT STILL) and I have lots to keep me occupied, lots of silly things like Homestuck, or music, or the Factorio expansion, or maybe I could get back into tactical games... and I have a huge list of books to read as well. So, I'm not sure why I got so hung up on loneliness for a while this year... maybe it was that work conversations and work stress made me more lonely (I was able to halve my meetings and I feel like a human again, I bet this was a big part of it), maybe it was that I wanted more enthusiasm from the people around me for my interests, maybe I needed more novelty in my life, hm. Who knows.