Why Every Friendship Eventually Exhausted Me
I used to describe myself, half-joking, as someone who just needed a lot of alone time — friendships were wonderful at first and then, reliably, became draining, and I chalked it up to introversion, or busyness, or just being someone who needed more recovery time than other people. What the Introversion Explanation Never Quite Accounted For It never explained why the exhaustion followed such a specific timeline — not random fatigue, but something that consistently set in once a friendship moved past the early, easier stage into something that required more honesty, more vulnerability, more actual presence. What Was Actually Happening in That Later Stage I was the one doing most of the emotional labor by then, without ever having decided to — checking in first, remembering details, managing the friendship's maintenance almost entirely on my own, while telling myself this was just what being a good friend looked like. The Cost I Wasn't Tracking Every one of those unspoken efforts cost something, and none of it was visible to me at the time because it had become completely automatic. By the time exhaustion showed up, it looked like the friendship's fault, or my own limited social battery, rather than the fully predictable result of a pattern I'd been running the entire time. What Changed the Story Once I actually tracked, for a few weeks, who initiated what in my closest friendships, the imbalance was obvious in a way it had never been while I was just living inside it. It wasn't that friendships exhausted me. It was that I'd been running the whole thing alone and calling it friendship.
Meet Ori — built to help you see the imbalance you've been carrying, since it rarely shows up until you actually look for it.
Part of The Recognition Library →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai
This is an illustrative composite, not a real member account.