The Cost of Disconnection. . . (Lost connections)

Silence isn’t just quiet. It’s a weight. It follows me, settling into my bones, coating every moment like a fog. I hear it in the absence of a message, in the stillness of nights spent staring at the ceiling.

This isn’t loneliness. It’s absence.

Not just the absence of company, but the absence of being seen. Of being understood. Of having anyone to reach for when the weight becomes unbearable. There’s no one. No one to sit across from and say, I don’t think I’m okay.

So I don’t say it. I just survive it.

Surviving is excruciating.

The thoughts have nowhere to go. No one to break the cycle of self-hatred that plays on repeat. They fester, multiply. They wait, vultures circling, ready to tear me apart.

Writing is my only release. That, and therapy.

But therapy is just one hour a week. One hour to untangle everything I’ve buried. After the session ends, I’m right back where I started, alone in my head.

I talk to myself constantly. Some of the questions try to understand: Why do I feel this way? What happened to me?

But most of them are weapons.
Why the fuck are you like this?
Why weren’t you enough for her?
Why does no one stay?
What the fuck is wrong with you?

It doesn’t matter how I answer. The voice never stops. It keeps cutting, digging, finding new ways to hurt.

Then the blame shifts. I curse her name. Call her selfish, cruel. I tell myself she never loved me, that she never cared.

But just as quickly as the anger comes, guilt follows.

Because I don’t hate her.
I love her.
And that love is what makes it unbearable.

Losing connection to the world means losing connection to yourself. When you don’t know who you are anymore, when all you can see is pain, you don’t just withdraw, you build walls. You don’t just avoid connection, you fear it.

Because connection means vulnerability. And I don’t trust anyone with that anymore. Not after what’s been taken from me.

So I isolate. I convince myself I’m safer this way. If no one gets close, no one can hurt me.

But isolation is a prison. A cruel one.
No bars. No locked doors. No escape. Because the warden is me.

Loneliness isn’t just an emotion. It’s physical. It seeps into your body. It slows you down, makes your chest heavy, drags you under like quicksand. No matter how much I sleep, I wake up exhausted. I can’t eat some days. Other days, I force myself to.

Depression isn’t just in my head. It’s in my body. It’s in the way I drag myself out of bed. It’s in the way my chest tightens when I think about her. About everything.

This isn’t just heartbreak. It’s grief.
Not just for her.
For myself.
Because I don’t know who I am anymore.

I used to be warm. I used to be kind. I used to have hope. But pain changes you. It carves you up, hardens you, turns soft places to stone. Even if I still have love to give, no one sees it.

All they see is the armor.

There’s a scene from Rectify that haunts me. Daniel Holden, a man released from death row, sits with his therapist and says:

“When you are alone with yourself all the time, with no one but yourself, you begin to go deeper and deeper into yourself until you lose yourself. It’s a perverse contradiction. Your ego begins to disintegrate, not in the way that makes you humble or gives you perspective, but in the way that you literally lose your sense of self.”

That’s isolation. It’s not just being alone. It’s worse.

It’s watching the world move while you stay stuck. It’s knowing life is happening beyond your walls, but you can’t touch it. It’s feeling like a ghost in your own existence.

The first time I felt like nothing was at the hotel. That toxic place, those people, they chipped away at me until I questioned if I was ever good at my job.

The next time was when I told her she was my family. She knew what that meant. Then she said, “That’s something a child would say.”

Hearing those words crushed me. They made me feel small, stupid. Like my love, my beliefs, my values, everything I held sacred, was a childish fantasy.

I want to believe she didn’t mean it. That it was just anger. But even if it was, it doesn’t matter.

Because she said it. And when those words come from her, they carry weight. Power. The kind that can either lift you up or break you. And in that moment, it broke me.

Isolation is its own death. Slowly. The kind that makes you forget you were ever alive to begin with.

I recently read Lost Connections by Johann Hari. One of the hardest truths in that book is that losing connection isn’t just painful. It’s dangerous.

Because when you lose connection, you don’t just lose others. You lose yourself.

At first, you don’t even notice. It’s subtle. You tell yourself you need space, that solitude is safer. You convince yourself you’re fine. Until one day, you wake up, and you don’t know who you are anymore.

The things that made you, you, your passions, your dreams, the small joys that got you through the day, slip away. They feel like they belonged to someone else. You go through the motions, but everything is hollow. You stop recognizing yourself. Not because your face has changed. Because your eyes have. The light in them is gone.

Pain takes its place.

Pain becomes your comfort. Your prison.
The only thing that still feels real.

Because when you’ve lost everything, even yourself, pain is the only thing that reminds you you’re still here. And you cling to it.

Because what else is there?

That’s the true cost of disconnection.

You don’t just lose everything.
You lose the will to look for it again.

After enough losses, after enough betrayals, after enough times of opening up only to be left behind, the thought of trying again feels impossible.

It feels like setting yourself up to be broken again.

So you don’t.

You sit in the silence. You stay in the prison you built.
Not because you want to.
But because, after a while, you forget there was ever a way out.