I don't want to let you go

My closest friend just sent me a nice email with written: "I understand how you feel, but I just want to see you happy".
It was nice. It is nice to know that someone wishes my happiness and look out for me, to try to protect me from suffering and being hurt. But sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes the same people who want our best are the ones who hurt us. I did the same too to people I deeply loved. Sometimes we don't realize how our actions can hurt another person. We don't mean bad, but the result can be very damaging for the other.

Anyway. My life in Portugal is not settled and I keep having huge mood shifts depending on the days, depending on work, depending on my interaction with the others, etc. I am constantly frustrated here because there is no way to get to the end of anything or have an answer to anything in a reasonable time. I am spending my time doing actually nothing for my own work, but just talking to this person and that person and this other person to try to figure out if we need to buy some materials, if we already have it and where it is, etc. It is a continuous loop in which people just talk, talk, talk.

I am definitively more a person of actions instead of just talk, talk, talk.

And I am Mediterranean, but I don't share the tipical Mediterranean mentality of "don't do today what you can do tomorrow". My motto is more "do what you have to do as soon as possible at least that thing is done and you can move on".

From here my deep frustration of living in this country so far. To get anything done, I need to ask the same thing over, and over, and over. I am already sick of it.

On top of this, there is my personal life, which is not at the top either. I always have huge problems in letting people leaving my life. When someone matters to me, either a friend, a colleague, or a past important boyfriend, I like to keep these people in my life, because they are the people who make a difference to me. My friends are few, but they are the same since longtime and when I meet new people, I keep only close friends when I move from one place to another. And I try my best to keep them as a part of my life, no matter how much time and energy I need to invest on it. They are the ones who make my life meaningful and much better.

Love and friendship mean a lot to me and to my mental health. I can't do without those.

The thing is that I don't get close to too many people. I am very protective of myself, because I know how vulnerable, sensitive, and how easily I can be hurt by people who get close to me and became important in my life. But the ones who make the cut, I wish they would stay there, in my life, forever.

I know that this doesn't work well with past boyfriend, especially if the relationship has been very intense and meant something to both. I know that this is also not easy when people live in different countries. Also because I am not able to go from a close relationship to someone to something very superficial. I have never been able to deal with people close to me who faded away in some way from my life. I always, always suffered very much because of that.

And it keeps happening. I never accept this as a fact of life. I am not the kind of person who thinks "we had a great time together and I am happy to be left with the memories of the good time we have". I am more the type of person who thinks "we had a great time together and I don't want this to be over".

But of course, this does not depend only on me...so what is the solution since I am clearly not able to let people go out of my life if they had/have an important role in it? I don't think that at this age I will ever learn how to deal with it. Should I close myself off even more to get close to people until I am 100% sure that they will play a role in my life and stay there? how can I know that in advance?

How can you avoid to get hurt since you cannot predict the future?