I don’t like when people are mad at me or annoyed with me about something. So when I am truly not living up to my social obligations – or if I feel like I am – then I don’t really want to deal with it.
It might stem from the lovely time I had in middle school (the source of most psychological scarring or neurosis) when I had quite a few friends only have me as their second-string companion. I was the ‘second best friend’ and I don’t think I was any higher with any of my groups throughout that period.
I did not realize this of course, my natural optimism and naiveté caused me to be blind to the fact that my friends would leave me out of things. Worse still I realize now that to a select few (not all but a few) of these peers, I was the pity friend. The one who had no friends and who could also serve as a source of ridicule either behind my back or in front of my face when I didn’t realize it.
As a result of that era of my social development, I constantly feel like the people whom I perceive to like me may suddenly become annoyed with me and leave me out in the cold.
It’s not just with friends either, sometimes with family and most certainly with people I have just met. Every human (even if it’s deep down) has an empirical need to be liked, and for some people (me) it’s difficult to understand when someone doesn’t.
It also makes me dread the usually-inevitable drifting apart of friends. I say it’s usually-inevitable because it is a lot of the time. It’s a natural progression: people meet, they have a great relationship for a while, but then interests diverge or someone moves or they have a big fight about something (the worst kind). And apparently trying to fight this is super duper hard.
It’s hard when friends leave, for any of the reasons possible. So I don’t think I’m alone in not wanting to experience it.
I’ve also been struggling with depression with varying success since that period. It’s only magnified recently because of the stress and shame of having no job and no friends outside of the internet. (We’ll get back to that in a bit)
I am constantly filled with a sense of shame that I am an annoying leech of a person who has lost the once promising spark of imagination and creativity she once had.
And the thing is I *know* that’s not true I *know* that I do matter. But then whenever I start to feel better about myself and try to focus on my strengths and succeed, I end up letting my social obligations fall to the wayside, and then I start to lose the closeness I once had with my loved ones.
This is not the reason I have no friends in RL, the ones I did have have drifted away to other states, and until now I didn’t have a license to go and do things with them. But it is the reason I feel I am losing particular internet friends.
Internet friends are just as good as RL ones, and sadly can be hurt just as much. It might be because I am trying to force a drifting friendship to stay put, or it might be due to my own bad life-juggling and fear or change. Or a little of both.
If I let my current friends down (be they RL or internet) than I risk then becoming annoyed with me and ditching me as so many of them have done in the past.
I am in no way trying to make anyone feel bad or place the blame on anyone else but myself. Sure that gives me another hit to the self-esteem; but to me it feels better than blaming others. For some reason it’s easier to deal with fighting myself than with others, and being mad at myself than others.
I am trying to ix that, I’m trying to work on it, but I feel exponentially selfish when I do so. So that would be my dilemma.
I’m not trying to say that I ‘have no time for friends’ because that would be an even sadder existence for me if that were the case. Also remember the ‘needing to be liked’ thing. I’m working on that as well. Not everyone will like me, that’s just another natural part of life.
I don’t really know where I’m going with any of this apart from getting it off my chest to (maybe) lighten the load. (I’m also disgusted with myself right now for all these paragraphs starting with ‘I’)
I don’t want to lose the people I care about, but I don’t know how to keep them if I don’t feel like I can do anything to better my situation without disappointing someone. Example: If I move out, my parents won’t have someone to walk the dogs at night or tell them how to work the DVD player.
I want to keep the relationships I have, and I know any social convention requires give and take, and I definitely feel like I’ve been taking more than giving lately. But when it’s something like a drifting or divulging of interests, then why can’t we find or do or talk about something we both enjoy? My brother and I used to watch wrestling all the time, playing with the figures and making our own storylines. But I don’t really care about it anymore and he does. It’s sad, because I do miss that time, but we’ve accepted that the time of us sharing that interest has passed, and we have found new things to bond over.
So if I try to make someone I care about care about something we used to have in common, but they now have no interest in, it just makes us more frustrated with each other. We’d all love to go back to how things used to be (me more than some) but if we are to accept change, we can’t. I am continually trying to learn and re-learn this lesson. Sometimes it sinks in for a while, in some parts of my life, but not others.
It really does seem like if we wanted to keep people in our lives, we would. So why can’t we? If things are irreversibly changed between people then they probably can’t, but if we can find something to keep us together even as we grow and age and change and evolve – even if the relationship is different from how it once was – isn’t it better than not having them in our lives at all?
I think so, or it would certainly ease things for people who aren’t that great with change (me).
Think I got everything that was weighing on my soul off. Again, I don’t really think this will change or help anything (me writing this) but it has helped me think about why it is I am feeling like this all the time.
This does feel like a part of my life where I am mostly alone, and so I have to be to work on myself. I know that sounds very selfish, but I am trying, on both causes of my stress and depression.
It’s nobody else’s fault, I really and truly feel that it is me who needs to work on things. But I do ask any of the loved ones I have if they read this, I am truly truly sorry. If you could forgive me, I think that might help me to forgive myself a little.
Also sorry if this reads like an emo LJ entry. I’m gonna keep my faith in God that things are indeed going according to plan, even though right now they really feel sucky.
