Lonely After Losing Everything..

I never expected to find myself starting over at this stage of my life.

I left a very abusive DV situation, and in doing so, I lost my entire social ecosystem. Every friendship I had was connected to that person. When the relationship ended, so did the community around it. The silence afterward has been deafening.

What I didn’t anticipate was the secondary grief - not just the abuse I endured, but the erasure of shared history, mutual friends, routines, inside jokes. It feels like social exile.

Both of my parents have passed away, and I come from a complex adoptive family background. There isn’t a solid “home base” to retreat to. No built-in safety net. No familiar place to land. So now I’m here rebuilding from scratch. Socially, emotionally, structurally. It’s disorienting and, if I’m honest, profoundly lonely.