I just broke up with a friend of afew years.
We met in college, she changed my life for the better, I'll never have a friend like that again.
3ish years ago she moved to a different state, we haven't hung out in person in forever. We talk on whatsapp all the time. Recently she got into some trouble and asked me for help, I should have refused. Not like it would have made a difference, we haven't talked in weeks.
I feel like I get "going through a hard time" better than everyone. Things suck right now but I have such a deep comprehension of how much worse-off I can be, I'm happy I'm not starving.
But I still manage to reach out, I still manage to grow and change and do new things. Why can't she, why can't my friends stop being so broke-minded when it comes to me.
Everything I want to do is 10x harder or 10x more expensive simply bc I suggest it but when others bring up the same ideas it's fine. How can it be impossible to manage in 10x difficulty when I do it all the time?
I cannot be special, that's against the rule that everybody is special therefore nobody's special therefore I cannot be special. So how is it possible that I can feel so aweful all the time and still drag myself to go out and have fun even though I'm at a bar alone. I can do it. It's not hard. Just go out and get a drink and stand there and be ok.
If you're feeling sad and a friend texts you then you have to text back, if you asked a friend for help and they helped you should owe them back atleast how hard it was for you to ask. You should have to give back something. And if you don't what does that mean for me? Do I gain the privilege to do something? Should I do something about it? What can be done?
So I decided to break up with her because even if I didn't help she can go months without talking to me and that's the same as not having friends to me so what? Why is it different? Why shouldn't I make something out of this empty pipe between us and fill it with a push, people have pushed me out, does that mean that I get the privilege to push people out too? Should I (I already did)?
All I know about making friends at my age is that the ROI is bad bc the cost is actually that daunting. The benefits have not increased since childhood but the difficulty has. And at some age I passed a threshold where the difficulty line rose above the benefit line and it's just going up and up and I can't stop it, I can't get ahead of it.
I can't do anything but loose people. My last friend is married, she'll be having kids in afew years, she's on the other side of the planet. We're effectively not even friends anymore but what can I say about it? Tell her to slow down for me?
I want community
I want my old cat back
I want to be a child again because I can't face an inevitable future where I know how much less I will have.
Numerous types of mental illnesses make this a lot more difficult do to for some people than others. You may feel like crap but you're not actively suffering deep depression. Deep depression literally makes it very, very physically difficult to drag yourself out of your place to be social. So for some people, it actually is incredibly hard.
That's some seriously circular logic going on here. It's not that "everybody is special" so much as everybody is unique. That doesn't make them special or good or anything, it just means every individual is fundamentally different from all the rest and handles interpersonal situations differently than all the rest. That's just basic social situational understanding, that different people respond differently to the same stimuli.
Just some food for thought, maybe people are going through different struggles than yourself and you should perhaps try to give them a little more grace.
Final thought, maybe pushing away friends because they're not fulfilling your demands of them enough and then complaining about not having any friends after that is kind of an unhealthy way of coping with these feelings. I have close friends that there have been stretches in life where we fell out of touch, but when push came to shove they were there for me, even if we hadn't spoken in years. Just because people are going through some shit and maybe not as available as they once were doesn't necessarily mean they don't care.