Alyanna Marielle

Therapy speak is getting in the way of our relationships

Alyanna Marielle — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:01:24 GMT

As I stare out my windows reflecting back the lights emanating from the CN Tower, I think back on all the moments my bids for connection to my friends have been shut down one way or another for the sake of protecting their peace. I, of all people, would understand what it means to be someone’s emotional sounding board and having to absorb all the negativity that comes with it but if it’s normal emotional conversations that we’re having, at what point then, does protecting one’s peace become a substitute for emotional unavailability?

Yes, I’m calling you out. In the age of Gen Z pseudo-therapist speak that has promulgated the internet, we love to throw out faux mental health terminologies in an effort to preserve so-called self-care when really all it does is promote our own selfishness. We possess the collective desire to be more sensitive and emotionally understanding while simultaneously clinging onto psychobabble to be more egotistical. We have grown allergic to other people’s vulnerabilities that we have taken it to mean a personal burden unto us. The thing with relationships, whether platonic or romantic, is that it will inevitably involve emotions. And emotions are messy and people don’t always metabolize it well on their own.

I do agree, however, that there is some responsibility for us to take in having to sit with our emotions before bringing it forth to our peers, and that in itself builds self-trust unobscured by someone else’s judgment. In other cases, some situations may have effectually produced too complex of emotions that we simply need to talk it out with someone until we make sense of it. We crave knowing that someone will be there for us when we reach for them. We want someone to hold our shaking hands as we untangle the webs of our feelings until we are able to grasp it ourselves.

Moreover, I would understand when a person genuinely has limited bandwidth to receive an emotionally loaded conversation in the moment. However, it is entirely different to avoid it altogether and it would only chip away at the trust and emotional intimacy that you share with the other person. That said, avoidance comes at the cost of our relationships.

I have recently encountered some friendship troubles that I went to a trusted friend wanting to seek advice on it, and frankly, just to have someone to lean on. As someone who is already hyper sensitive and vigilant about feeling like a burden to others, I don’t normally resort to opening up to my friends, which feels like an enormous act of trust on its own, unless I feel it is absolutely necessary. Mind you, I’m not the type of person to unload all my heavy emotional weight out of nowhere without consideration for another person’s mental capacity. Though, I must admit I find it challenging toeing the responsibility of managing someone else’s reaction on top of my current agitated state. In addition, my family lives on the other side of the world so I don’t readily have access to emotional support when needed (twelve hours is a huge discrepancy)—that is, when I’ve finally reached a state of emotional distress which becomes concerning at that point. So I find it truthfully surprising and utterly unappealing that a lot of people would back away from these conversations instantly and at a time when their friend needs them the most.

Take for example the time I gently attempted to broach a sensitive topic with my friend and was basically met with a nonchalant “no thanks” in response; or that time when I made a meaningless inquiry that was understood to mean as a larger ask and was hit with a “I don’t have the capacity to help you right now, I need to help myself first”. Needless to say, I was flabbergasted. It feels like an unnecessary balancing act when it comes to the simple gesture of opening up to our friends nowadays. I find it almost ridiculous that we have to tread so carefully about being vulnerable to the people whom we’re supposed to trust on a deep and personal level lest it be wrongfully interpreted as us burdening them with our emotions. God forbid I cross your boundaries, but at what cost? Have we become so fragile to other people’s emotions nowadays that even a tinge of it becomes generalized as drama.

We have become programmed to indulging in self-care as a guise for protecting our self-interests, which isn’t inherently wrong in and of itself, but when it means shutting down when approached with conversations that involve even the slightest degree of emotional labor, all of a sudden we back away with our tails tucked in between our legs. We end up relinquishing all empathy because we refuse to take accountability for someone else’s emotional experience resulting in us ultimately pushing people away.

Let’s admit it: protecting our peace has become a façade for emotional unavailability, and perhaps it’s high time for us to start questioning: why do we find it hard to digest someone else’s vulnerability? Why are so we unable and unwilling to meet other people’s emotional complexities and demonstrate a shred of humanity through basic compassion and understanding? Is it because we haven’t been in touch with our own? Have we learned, somewhere along the way, that being too emotionally involved with another person would only end up in hurt so we would rather be detached in our relationships? Honestly? What an empty and lonely existence that must be.

Although, there is some degree of truth in that we can only receive others as deeply as we understand ourselves. How else can we begin to fathom what our friends are bringing to the table if we aren’t even willing to examine ourselves in the same light?

Another instance where I’ve been stung by cold, cold emotional avoidance would be whenever I would try to initiate personal conversations with another friend in hopes of deepening my connection with her. I would usually be met with a response of “I don’t feel like sharing/talking about it”—how exactly do you expect to cultivate a genuine friendship with someone who avoids intimacy at all costs?

Perhaps some people are only built to skim the surface and aren’t keen on delving in too deep, whether because they feel that whatever connections they make would only be fleeting if they are in a transitory phase in their life, or simply because they lack the capacity to receive others in their fullness knowing they can’t reciprocate themselves to that extent.

We should be mindful that establishing boundaries is different from not participating in connection at all. We push back for the sake of promoting therapy speak BS (e.g. protecting our peace, capacity, boundaries, self-care, etc.), and we push, and push, and push so far until it’s too late and we realize the person on the other end is gone. We have grown immune to realizing when we’ve become far too selfish for our own good, and we need to start taking responsibility for the fact that we are effectively hindering ourselves from forming the meaningful relationships that we seek. It’s not that deep to be deep.

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I write about the challenges and experiences that shape us throughout our twenties, particularly about love, friendships, building community and a sense of belonging, and the discovery of self-identity. If this resonates with you, consider staying for more!

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What the hell does it mean to be a friend?

Alyanna Marielle — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 22:01:49 GMT

Everyone wants to form authentic friendships but do we actually understand what it means to participate in it?

At the ripe age of twenty eight years old, I’ve had my fair share of friendships weave in and out of my life that, at this point, it seems like natural progression. I’ve gained friends whom I thought were going to be permanent fixtures in my life, formed tight-knit circles which proved to be viable for social outings, and have experienced the harsh and slow healing wounds of betrayal that led to the eventual collapse of these relationships. As I brush off the dust from the aftermath, I must admit that I struggle to trust again—and maybe, that’s what we’re all scared of. In the age of romanticizing genuine connections and a sense of community, perhaps the main thing that is hindering us from being a part of something worthwhile and meaningful is exactly the thing that we’re trying to avoid.

I think it is worth taking a certain degree of culpability to acknowledge that I am, by no means, a perfect friend or partner. However, as with most relationships, they are certainly a two-way street that all parties equally need to participate in. Such is the case of one of my connections whom I could say the trust had gradually eroded, I’ve observed this particular friend to not be as participative in social situations. Granted this could be due in part of their temperament and whether they find themselves to lean more introverted or outgoing in social interactions, but only so much could be excused by this. This phase in our friendship can no longer be categorized as a budding relationship as we have been exposed to regular group gatherings for over half a year (and counting). In group settings, I’ve observed that she rarely contributes and shows little interest in learning about her friends on an individual level—their passions, hobbies, motivations, goals and dreams. These are the kind of stuff that peels back the layers and initiates more substantial and lasting relationships in our lives!

At the onset of this friendship was the intimidating getting-to-know stage where I personally feel I’ve made substantial attempts to really get to know her on a deeper, emotional level. I’ve persisted in setting one-on-one hangouts and, like a doctor inspecting one’s internal organs with an endoscope, tried asking probing questions in hopes of forming a personal, more intimate connection with her.

One thing that I’ve learned is that, you cannot fast-track intimacy with someone. As many people would agree, relationships take time. It takes months and perhaps even years to nurture and develop. So I’ve tried watering this one to see if the garden and all its promise of lush blooms would thrive. Months have passed like the swift ticking of the clock gone in the instant you blink your eyes, and in a separate incident, I’ve come to learn that this person unfortunately held negative opinions about me (now, that is an essay for another day!) despite my gestures of goodwill and efforts to integrate her into our friend group. Throughout these limited social interactions, I have noticed that there has been little to no reciprocal effort from her to get to know me, truly, and because there hasn’t been enough repeated exposure, the friendship naturally came to a stall. She only cared to ask surface questions, the kind that keeps the conversation going but not exuding any real interest in forming a deeper bond with me. I’ve grown weary of one-sided relationships at this point that if someone lacks in showing mutual interest or care in maintaining the connection, I’d rather let it die a natural death.

It was an abrupt yet perceivable end, something you could sense from miles away because of the foreboding lack of effort from the other side, and so you make peace with it well before you lay it to rest. It initially felt like the friendship was headed to a great destination, a car breezing along a highway towards the sunset, full of life and the potential for something new. We were finally gaining momentum, it was only when we started making the climb uphill that our car started creaking like a disabled thing, slowly fading in front of our eyes, that despite having both passengers in it, only I was left struggling to push it upwards.

I presume that this person similarly craves genuine friendships and a community like most of us. I’m not discounting her efforts in showing up with gestures of thoughtful gifts or tokens on random occasions, however it feels somewhat performative as if that is solely what she perceives is expected of her based on social media trends. Like a boyfriend only getting their partner a gift or roses on their anniversary but not showing up in ways that matter, it renders the whole act rather hollow. I am a highly inquisitive person, so I would naturally put forth questions that indicate an active liking and interest in my friends’ lives, but to much of my frustration, I would get shut down with non-responses such as, “I don’t feel comfortable in saying,” or “I don’t want to disclose,” she would respond to most of my queries as if the answers to questions about her personal life involve highly confidential government information that betrays national security.

For the sake of protecting our boundaries, are we inevitably putting up defensive walls that are unwarranted in the first place? More so, do we end up pushing the people away who have the potential to care tremendously about us?

You would then understand why I find it utmost frustrating when I put in the effort to form these connections just for them to slowly wither under broad daylight when I’ve already taken my turn of tending to it. Because here’s the deal—relationships are uncomfortable and they take effort. It asks us reveal the deepest parts of ourselves to people whom we’re only beginning to trust, ironically, it is in that act of vulnerability that ends up building that trust to begin with; it forces us to look at ourselves in the mirror and confront the ugly parts we couldn’t even bear to look at but our friends are honest enough to point out because they care about us. Most of all, relationships demand reciprocity. We can’t be entitled to genuine friendships if we don’t want to put in our share of developing them. It is unfair to only want the social media highlight reels glamorizing building a lifelong community without even beginning to understand what it means to be part of one.

Essentially, this means taking an active interest in our friends’ lives—asking questions that matter, showing up in ways that prove we’re dependable, and mutually participating in growing and maintaining that friendship if you want it to last. That means not only showing up to a girls’ night out or dinner social like furniture, you have to actually be present. These all seem to be the bare minimum but trust me, not everyone has the capacity to lead with vulnerability.

Similarly, we exert a lot of effort in meeting new people through group meets, workshops, lectures, hobbies, etc. but what do we actually do in keeping those relationships alive? It is one thing to put yourself out there through these social events that allow you to connect with like-minded people, it is an altogether more demanding thing to try and sustain those connections beyond the screen of your phone. Genuine relationships and friendships exist in real life.

So we need to ask ourselves—how do we show up in relationships? What strides are we taking if our desire is to form deep and meaningful connections and are we contributing to it equally? We cannot demand vulnerability from another if we don’t lead in the same regard, and it would only prove to be a most arduous task if we approach every situation with our walls up because that clearly signifies that we do not trust the other person. We need to learn, no matter how terrifying the risk, to let people in and get to know us, and if we struggle with doing so then we have to ask ourselves why. I’m not about to delve into the psychology of attachment theory now, as I’m sure certain predispositions; cultural, religious, personal upbringing; and family dynamics, etc. especially during the malleable adolescent phase influence the way we relate to others in adulthood, but it is our responsibility now to work on breaking the patterns that hinder us from experiencing and enjoying the full spectrum of relationships—from allowing ourselves to know and be known deeply.

It is in accepting the risk of being disappointed that lets us show up with the capacity of being fully and honestly ourselves in relation to others. Before we even get to that, we need to cultivate radical self-trust. We need to rest in the confidence of knowing that even with the possibility of heartbreak or betrayal, that we’re going to be okay. Otherwise, we’re never going to get to the point of attaining the real relationships we so desperately crave and is innate in the sustenance of a well-lived life.

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The burden of being a villager

Alyanna Marielle — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:01:51 GMT

They say that in order to build a community, you must be a villager. I’ve come to learn, however, that being a villager is often more complicated than simply showing up. This begs the question of performance inside friendships—are we simply showing up for our friendships for the sake of maintaining the identity of “being a good friend,” or are we doing so with honest intentions?

Furthermore, what happens when other villagers expect you to show up at a capacity you simply cannot maintain? What happens when your desire to belong collides with the limits of what you can realistically give? It’s not so black-and-white when you’re on the receiving end of expectations.

Perhaps this situation struck a nerve because community has never been something I’ve taken for granted. When I moved to Canada in 2022, I formed a friend group that I thought was going to be a mainstay in my life. In 2024, I lost that same friend group almost overnight. Some friendships faded naturally with distance, while others disappeared under the weight of circumstance. It’s not easy to maintain friendships when you move across continents. Starting over in a new country meant rebuilding a social life from scratch—at first, it felt exciting, but later it grew lonely. Meeting people who have grown up here and carried their friendships from as early as high school into adulthood made me yearn for my own, but even those friendships have fallen under the weight of distance.

Every meaningful friendship I cultivated afterward felt like it could be it—the forever friendships that I desperately want to remain in my life. Soon after, every invitation, coffee date, and shared heart-to-heart moment felt like a small brick laid toward this greater sense of belonging that I felt was deeply crucial to sustaining my life abroad. Slowly, cracks began to appear in one of those communities, and a sense of dread surfaced, akin to the loss of my old friends here. It was as though an uninvited déjà vu came knocking at my door.

It was a warm day, the final stretch of May leading into summer, and I had decided to spend it with a friend at the park. We sat beneath the shade of a tree, chatting casually. Little did I know that other things were veiled as well.

Unbeknownst to me, one of my friends had passed along information about me through another friend. The context of that information, I felt, consisted of judgments made with very little insight into my personal life. While I understand that secondhand information often travels poorly across contexts, what I learned was that she held negative opinions about my relationship and how I chose to spend my time.

Whether that information was accurate or not, I felt myself shrink into a hopeless child all over again. The same child who was once hastily judged and betrayed by people she knew. Anger quickly took its place.

I’ve never spoken about these topics with her in any great depth, so I was taken aback by where she could have drawn those conclusions from.

At that point, I was struggling to gulp down my coffee. The arepa I had bought from the Colombian café across the street was bland and tasteless. Much could be said about the state I found myself in at that exact moment. It was as if time had stopped for me while life continued moving around me.

In the distance, an ethnic dance group moved to the rhythm of drums. A family chatted nearby. A dog rolled onto its back before wandering over to sniff me.

Everywhere, there was life, but my body felt frozen, everything except the tear that rolled down my cheek. I stared at the sun with my chin pointing toward the sky, hoping that the dam that had been unleashed would find its way back into the crevices that had formed.

My mind struggled to comprehend how someone whom I considered a good friend—someone I believed I had treated kindly and respectfully—could say something so judgmental behind my back. Her words cut through me, and she didn’t even need to wield the knife herself.

Looking back, I think part of what hurt so much wasn’t necessarily what was said, but what I believed it meant.

My mind was quick to fill in the meaning. It had scanned our friendship history in one fell swoop. Like a film rolling, it skipped over moments where I may have fallen short or unconsciously given less than what she expected from a friend, and it rapidly unraveled into self-pity until my mind was tangled with old voices warped by history: “you’re not being a good friend”, “soon enough, they’re going to leave all the same,” At least, that’s what I believed.

I’ve always struggled with anxiety. While I’ve gotten much better at managing it over the years, my mind still has a tendency to fill in blanks when information is incomplete. Criticism, no matter how constructive, transforms into rejection. A disappointment becomes proof that I’ve failed. A misunderstanding becomes evidence that I’m unwanted. A grievance becomes confirmation that I’ve somehow ruined everything.

All of this is to say that I disappeared from the dynamic, believing it was a failing on my part and that somehow all my friends would be better off without me.

I must admit that I’m not proud of what happened next. There was an incessant storm brewing inside my head that had clouded my judgment. I sent a curt text confronting my friend. I wish I hadn’t been so impulsive, but in that moment I desperately needed her to understand my hurt.

Soon the sun became too much to bear. Whether it was the heat or the overwhelming flood of emotions, I couldn’t tell. What was supposed to be a sweet summer afternoon in the park quickly turned sour. Still, the day carried on.

I accompanied my friend—the unwitting third party in all of this, while she shopped for a white dress she needed for an upcoming occasion. How ironic that we spent the afternoon searching for a dress in a colour associated with innocence, a word that could easily have described what this friendship once felt like to me.

I went home feeling deflated, as though I had been punished for a crime I didn’t know I had committed. That same afternoon, while chatting with another friend in the group, an entirely different grievance surfaced, one I didn’t even know existed. What was once a conversation about shopping, which I felt we had always bonded over, turned into a disappointing intervention. So it goes.

Through blurry eyes, I skimmed paragraphs detailing her disappointment in me. She felt I wasn’t considering her enough. She felt that her time was being neglected. She felt as though I wasn’t showing up in the ways she needed me to. That was the last straw.

The thing about receiving criticism from multiple people at once is that your brain stops processing individual complaints and begins constructing a narrative. Mine certainly did.

By the time I stood under the shower, I wasn’t hearing two friends expressing hurt. I was hearing one message: “You’re a bad friend”. The walls felt as though they were closing in on me. The water ran over my skin but it couldn’t wash away the shame gathering inside my chest. With a loud thud, I hit my fist against the wall. Maybe I needed the pain outside to match the pain inside.

Everything I heard seemed to confirm my worst fears. You’re not doing enough. You’re disappointing people. You are failing the people you love.

The irony is that I had spent the past few months trying very hard not to lose myself inside my relationship. I had maintained hobbies. I read constantly. I wrote. I pole danced. I enrolled in a creative writing program for the summer. I nurtured interests and goals outside of my relationship because I believed maintaining my individuality was important. And yet, I felt I was being incorrectly perceived as not having a life outside of my relationship, which I have fought so hard to maintain specifically to avoid this exact stereotype. I didn’t want to be that girl who disappears the minute she gets a boyfriend. I had worked hard not to become that person, so that minimization felt unfair as if all my kindness was instantly reduced to a few missed coffee dates.

Yet somewhere along the way, friendship had quietly begun to feel like another performance metric. Another category where I could succeed or fail. Another place where capacity was measured against expectation. As someone who has always strived for perfection in all endeavors, it’s tough knowing I’ve failed at something I didn’t realize I was being scored on.

At some point, I grabbed a pair of scissors and sat on the floor crying. What my intention at that moment is as unclear to me as it is to you. More than anything, I was terrified. Of losing my friends. Of having to start over. Of finding myself once again standing on unfamiliar ground, rebuilding from scratch. I was afraid of losing myself. Thankfully, fear stopped me before I could do any meaningful harm.

In the days that followed, I began thinking about the saying: it takes a village. For a while, I believed I had failed at being a villager. Perhaps I did. Perhaps there was some degree of truth in what my friends were saying about me. Maybe in the path to realizing my current priorities, some aspects of my life unknowingly started to take the back seat. I hadn’t meant for any of this to happen in this way but I also realize some seasons of life demand more from us in certain relationships, ambitions, and goals, that others inevitably fall through the cracks. That doesn’t demean their value in our life, it just means we find ourselves in a phase where some things are less vital to what we are currently pursuing. It’s like being adrift at sea, we can’t take our belongings with us, we only need ourselves to swim to the shore.

However, the more I reflected, the more I realized that perhaps my understanding of the phrase had been incomplete. A village is not simply a collection of people showing up perfectly for one another. It is a collection of imperfect people attempting to care for one another despite their limitations. Whether my friends share that understanding is a different question altogether.

I understand my friends were justified in feeling hurt. Maybe I truly had missed moments when they missed me. Maybe there were conversations we should have had sooner rather than hearing about it indirectly through another mutual friend. But I also wonder whether friendship sometimes suffers when we begin measuring love through performance. Since when did our attendance become proof of affection? When did frequency become evidence of loyalty? I can’t help but feel that every missed invitation now might feel like a personal rejection of them. Moreover, I’ve always believed that, if we ought to hold our platonic friendships to the same standards as our romantic relationships, shouldn’t that also entail unconditional love?

I grew up in a household where my family gave without expecting anything back. I grew up to share the same beliefs in generosity with affection. I felt as if I was shamed that an invite or two that I had missed quickly turned into a generalization of my character, seemingly sweeping all the other times I have indeed shown up. It’s a dangerous place to be when we start keeping score in our relationships, marking every missed hangout as a deficiency of their character–that, I believe, is an easy ticket to resentment.

The older I get, the more I realize that adulthood asks each of us to carry different burdens. Some seasons leave us with abundant energy for connection. Others leave us struggling to meet even our own needs. Neither reality makes us bad friends. It simply makes us human. I wish I could defend myself in this way but I would probably always be seen through the lens of: “The friend who never showed up”. That assumption about my character can be difficult to contend with when I am a neurotic people pleaser. The friend who is agreeable and never wants to rock the boat. The friend who lays low in certain areas of her life and shares as little information about sensitive topics to keep the peace. Despite my efforts of playing it small, playing it safe, I didn’t think that war would be begging on its knees to have me.

All that is said, I still believe in being a villager. I still believe that communities require effort, care, and reciprocity but perhaps we ought to realize that being a good villager is not about showing up perfectly every time. Maybe it is about extending the same grace we hope to receive when we inevitably fall short ourselves.

Because at the end of the day, I can only offer the water I have, and while I try to water the different flowers in my garden, I simply cannot pour myself dry when that is all the water I can hold.