38 [M4F] Frederick, MD or just online - looking for mutual empathy and exchanging cat photos

I'm actually posting to make friends and to start off with ongoing text chats throughout the day. I'm okay with maintaining a friendship that never advances further than that. I'd prefer 30+ so I don't feel like a creep.

In the present I am a person working to recover from both physical and emotional trauma. I've been at this for about a year now. I'm proud of how far I've come, but I'm not all the way to the finish line yet. I still have a ton of necessary growth and recovery in front of me, both in my physical health and in my emotional health. A lot of people have worked hard to help me get this far, being a friend for me means involvement in the emotional half of my healing. I would be very willing to reciprocate that - if it ever feels safe unloading, I will do my best to listen and empathize. I take a lot of pride in being there for my friends when they need it.

Lately my favorite thing is I've been reading choose-your-own-adventure books out loud over voice chat with a penpal and we work to come to a consensus on each choice. If you're local we could just get a library membership and book a room there, but otherwise I've got a system worked out for doing it over telegram. I wrote a dumb little program where I take a pirated pdf and it converts each page in the book into a jpeg (so page 108 would be 108.jpg). I disable the image previews on my computer so I can't see ahead of time if it's an ending page, and put the picture of the page we've chosen to go to next in the chat. We read the page out loud to each other and debate which choice makes the most sense.

I was a math professor in a past life, but I am not working while still in recovery. I do hope to return to teaching at the college level, but if I'm being honest I don't really have a good idea of what my future looks like anymore. I've had to move back in with my folks, eight hours away from where I had been living. Mom's allergies meant that move required a goodbye to my best friend.

I'm a big animal guy in general. I think most people understand that there's a joy in happy animals. Getting to a place where I can be a cat owner again might currently be a higher priority than finding a partner tbh. I have other interests too of course but it's not important to me that you share any of those.