30 Days of Navigating Life as a 23-Year-Old: Day 7 —Something Feels ‘Off’
When everything is okay, and yet not.
Less than a month ago, I parted ways with two of my closest friends. I’ve known them for over 5 years now. In 3 of those years, we got super tight.
I moved on quickly, considering that we rarely met face-to-face and most of our conversations were online. Today, I happened to scroll past some of our photographs and found myself reflecting a lot on our friendship; more importantly, the end of our friendship.
This is me writing it all out to make sense of it and process it in a healthy way.
We all went to the same college and soon became part of the same friend group. We were getting closer when Covid hit and we had to physically distance ourselves from one another. But, funnily, we grew closer through that tough phase and came out stronger. We were thicker than ever.
We graduated from college during Covid and couldn’t see each other often. After graduation, we all got busy with our jobs. However, post-Covid, despite our busy schedules, we did start meeting up regularly; at least once every two weeks. We would make time for each other, hang out at cafés, do night-ins at each other’s homes, explore the city, etc.
They were the kinds of friends I could be silly with one minute, and the next minute, engage in deep conversations. We talked about everything: from work to family to childhood to relationships to life — EVERYTHING. The conversations and the vibes were immaculate.
But a year into the friendship post-graduation, I felt something shift. I did have it great with them. I felt safe with them. I could let go and be my true self with them. And yet, after a year of such closeness, something started to feel off. I couldn’t really understand what or why. But something changed.
I started finding myself getting obsessive thoughts about them and our friendship. I started overthinking it — something I stopped doing 2.5 years ago. I started ‘debunking’ all of their words and actions, their expressions, their tone, everything. And I started realizing — this is not what friends do. They do not obsess, overthink or debunk the words, actions, or behaviour of other close friends. That’s not a sign of a healthy friendship.
I thought I was being unreasonable and insecure about my friendship with them. I thought I had some insecurities I needed to deal with in order to show up as a better friend to them. I started introspecting, journaling, meditating and reflecting on my actions, thoughts, and why they even came up in the first place.
As I started on that journey, I still never really felt good about how our friendship was shaping and where it was heading. Something still felt off. And even though I did decide to brush past that feeling and show up for them like before, I could not bring myself to do that anymore.
Every time they asked to meet me, my whole body would repel at the suggestion. I would contract. Literally. My body would physically contract. My face would form a weird expression that I had no control over. It felt like my whole being was trying to push them away from me. It made no sense at all.
After all, everything was going great. I genuinely loved them (and I still do). And I was truly grateful to have them in my life. I don't know when that shift happened, but I knew that we could not go on like before.
Eventually, I found myself looking for reasons — big or small — to avoid them. I started finding excuses to get away from them. I reached a point where just texting them back felt like too much effort. Meeting up with them was not even a matter of consideration. I felt like I had to physically push myself, force myself to go meet them.
Don’t get me wrong, when I did meet up with them, we had a great time alright! But when I left, I felt more drained than energized. Now, that is NOT a feeling you feel after you’ve hung out with your close friends. If anything, you depart from them having completely forgotten about the world and all the problems still waiting for you in it. But I no longer felt that way after hanging out with them. I just felt low.
It reached a point where I started looking for reasons to just end my friendship with them. And a few months in, I did find one. And yes, if it were any of my other friendships, I would have overlooked it. Or maybe I would’ve talked it out with them and cleared the air around it.
But this time, I did not feel like putting in the effort. I guess it also came from my previous experiences I’d had with them. Whenever I had a talk with them about something that affected me, they’d apologise, sure, but there would be no change in actions or behaviour from their side right after. The same thing would continue and it would keep affecting me. I was not okay with that.
So, when I got my ‘reason’ to call it quits with them, I knew talking would not help because we had already been through it several times before. And nothing had changed. Therefore, I decided that it was time for me to distance myself from it all and protect my peace.
And so, I did.
I cut my ties with them. I stopped responding to their messages. I stopped responding to their calls. I stopped engaging with them in any sort of way.
And I did move on pretty fast, I must say. As I mentioned earlier, not seeing each other regularly did help. It made the moving on process easier and faster. (Good for me!).
Weirdly, in the week post the “break-up,” I started feeling so relieved. I felt lighter. I felt happy that I did not need to respond to them anymore. I took comfort in the fact that I did not have to meet or engage with them anymore. The only word to describe it is relief. That is exactly what I felt.
To add to it, the constant feeling of something being ‘off’ was gone. It just vanished the moment I cut them off. The ‘off’ feeling was replaced with the feeling of relief and joy.
I know — odd, right? I felt that too.
I was so confused because there was no ‘one thing’ I could point to and explain that that was the reason everything started going downhill. I could not pinpoint one particular experience that made me feel like I had to end things with them.
It was just a feeling. A constant, nagging feeling of something not being right. I tried to make sense of it. And that is exactly why I tried to write it down as well. But as I wrote this article, I could still not put into words what ‘one thing’ went wrong. Because there was no one thing that went wrong. It was just a feeling all along.
And I believe that was my gut feeling. My intuition. Guiding me to let go of things that were not meant for me anymore. I realized the version of me that became friends with them was not the current version of me anymore. I had grown. I had changed. And so had they.
My only logical explanation for all of this is that maybe the directions we grew in branched out differently. And all we could do was follow our paths and let go of people who were not meant to be with us on that path.
Of course, I’m not trying to rationalize this in any way. I believe logic really takes away the magic from humans and experiences. It’s better for some things to not make sense. It’s better to just take them as they come, unfolding themselves and their reasons to us slowly and gradually.
I did that. I followed the feeling. I followed the nudge. And I realised: if something feels off, more likely than not, it is.
Trust It.
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