I moved to the city I currently live in at the end of 2019. I had never lived outside my hometown prior to this. Internally I felt provincial and ashamed of my inexperience in life. I wanted to put what I saw as my inadequacy behind me. But I also didn’t fully know what putting it behind me would entail. I wanted to be someone I could be proud of. Someone experienced in the world and who knew and was comfortable with themselves. But I wasn’t that, and knew I wasn’t that, and had no idea how to not be that.

I had moved to my new city to be closer to a friend I had had through the majority of my 20s. I had spent many hours with this person previous to moving. We had traveled and gone to music festivals together. I thought I knew this person. I assumed that this person valued and respected me. I cared about him, so surely he must care about me.

I realized after moving that I didn’t actually know him as I thought I did. Quickly after my move, his mask dropped. He went out of his way to mock or embarrass me in social situations. He invited people over to my apartment without telling me, stole from me, and damaged my property. He pushed his prescriptions pills on me, then accused me of stealing his medication. It was a living nightmare. There was never a clear precedent to this behavior in the times I knew him before I moved.

Eventually I confronted him over the phone for the hundreds of dollars he owed me from destroyed or stolen property. He had in previous weeks assured me that he would “pay me back”, but as the weeks rolled by, no money or repair ever materialized. Over the phone, he became defensive and difficult. Afterward he disappeared from my life for about a month. He reappeared later only in my email inbox. There, I found a message telling me that he was uninterested in ever speaking to me again, that he had blocked me on every online platform and that I should make no attempt to contact him.

That was it. The unceremonial end of what I had previously conceptualized as a decade of close friendship. And the start of my new life alone in a strange city.

This all occurred some time ago, a little over half a decade now. Since then, I have lived different lives. I made new friends, some of which I also then lost, but some who I have retained. I feel less insecure, but not because I became the worldly and impressive person that I wanted to be, but because I suffered through not being that. Eventually I learned to show up while still feeling inadequate. I am now more cautious and slower to trust others than I was previously. I see now how you can never really know someone. But I have reoriented myself to prioritize being known by other less. I want to be known by myself, for who I really am, not who I could be. This is a work in progress, but it is worth the effort.