TL;DR I (29F) missed out on my entire youth due to significant social anxiety. Because of this, I didn’t form many friendships in early life and missed out on many experiences. How do I find peace knowing I can never relive this huge chunk of my life?
I (29F) suffered with extreme social anxiety during my youth, to the point that I was essentially mute until high school. This had a huge impact on my friendships and prevented me from having a lot of the experiences that most cherish most in life…. Middle school friendships, sleepovers, girl chats, high school parties, and uni nights going out are things that I have missed out on and will never have the chance to experience again.
Thanks to a lot of hard work, I have overcome a huge chunk of my social anxiety to the point that most people would never guess that it is something that affects me. I have also had a significant “glow up” and get treated a lot differently now by the opposite sex.
The problem… I am now realizing just how much I lost out on, which I can never get back. I am absolutely gutted.
I thought I at least had a close relationship with my sister (25F) since we routinely have deep talks, but I recently realized that she has a much different and more “fun” relationship with her high school friends because they experienced a lot of wild and formative things together. She has told me that it’s too late for us to grow that aspect of our relationship since that is something that develops early in life. She is also getting married and is in a completely different phase of life now. This realization also shook me.
At this point, I am not sure how to move on. I feel very alone and like I don’t have anyone who truly sees me for me and loves me entirely.
How do I come to terms with
1- The idea that I may never have the sort of relationship I crave with my friends or sister
and;
2- I will never be able to fully recreate the experiences I missed from my youth, which is a HUGE chunk of life I am missing
Thanks for your help 😊
19 comments
Please note that you are falling into another anxiety cycle. I commend you on your progress so far but don’t trap yourself into losing your future by fixating on the past.
Not everyone maintains contact with highschool friends, in fact frequently people grow apart from those people. Not everyone has that youth with their siblings, me and my brother didn’t become close until we were both in our mid to late 20s after barely speaking for a decade and we are extremely close now. The friendships and romances you develop as adults, even at your age, are just as meaningful if not moreso than friendships with a lot of time behind them.
You are who you are. Rather than fixate on this idealised caricature of what you feel you ought to have experienced instead focus on making the most of who you are now. That is all that really matters.
Family and friends are pretty overrated in our rugged individualistic society. Find a mate and don’t worry about anything else.
You don’t. The past is gone, many people don’t get to live the future. People who die in their 20s, 30s or 40s don’t get to experience the rest of their life but you are here right now, hopefully healthy so start today. Take your energy from the past & put it in the present
Maybe go out a little. Concerts, parties, theater, a nice meal. Why not? You have more than enough life still in front of you.
Don’t let the “fear of missed out” ruin your present and future opportunities. I suffer from similar thing. If I had a way to turn back, I would turn back but I think I wouldn’t have done anything differently – because I wouldn’t be the person I’m now without all those experiences.
It’s easier said than done. Just don’t fall into the circle of constantly regretting the past but rather focus on your “Now” and future.
I’m a little older than you, OP. I made a friend (also in her 30s) at a previous job a few years ago. When I left, we stayed friends, and I still go to her house once a week to drink, play video games, eat too much pizza, goof off, and talk about deep shit. Basically all the makings of a high school sleepover (except I come home to my cat and my own comfy bed at the end). I have friends I met online that I meet once a year for a three-day slumber party where we sleep in a big pile on the floor and laugh till we can’t breathe. We’re all grown-ass adults with jobs and kids and mortgages.
My point is that there’s no age limit on forming new friendships, on “fun,” or on any kind of relationship you may want. You’re not alone in this world. There are people out there who can become your soulmates, whether you’re 29 or 39 or 99. They can be hard to find, and yeah, not every friendship will turn into that kind of bond. But even the friends you meet up with once every few months for coffee and then never see in between can be a spectacular part of the mosaic of your life.
Don’t count yourself out. Your life and your happiness don’t have an expiration date. None of us know how long we have on this earth. We’re all just doing our best with the time we have, and that’s what you have to do as well. And the good news is that since we’re all in this together, none of us are ever truly alone.
I have a friend who was in a long-term (unhappy) relationship from the ages of 18-28. After she left, she moved to a new city, got a new boyfriend, made friends with all his friends and got welcomed into our fold, and is now a popular DJ in our local scene. Trust me, it’s never too late.
> she has a much different and more “fun” relationship with her high school friends because they experienced a lot of wild and formative things together
On the flip side, I am not friends with any of my high school friends (except one whom I only see 1-2 a year) because those “formative” experiences involved them bullying me. Instead, I’m very close with all the friends I’ve met since leaving high school. Some of my closest friends are people I only got close with in my late 20’s. I personally give a side-eye to people who’s friendship circle comprises of the same circle they had in high school. So much personal development comes from being exposed to new people.
> Middle school friendships, sleepovers, girl chats, high school parties, and uni nights going out
I didn’t get any of this either. For me, life started and got good after I left all that high school bullshit behind. I was a 22 year old who was friends with many 29+ year olds, and I loved partying all night with them.
Don’t try to recreate or recapture some idea of your youth. Meet people (and embrace yourself) where you’re at now. “I am a person who made huge inroads to overcome my anxiety, and changed the course of my life. I’m ready to discover who I am and who I like to spend my time with.” Focus on your present and your future, not some hypothetical past that exists in pop culture more than it does in real life.
I’m in my 30s, and I’m really only close with one middle school/high school friend any more, and a lot of my experiences with high school parties and friendships and those things you feel you missed out on were actually kind of depressing in retrospect. College experiences were better, and definitely my mid 20s were an important social time for me, but I’m also currently closer with friends from my later 20s and early 30s than I am with my college friends or most of the friends from that period, in part because I grew and changed a lot since then. So in my experience, you can definitely forge deep, meaningful friendships and have awesome social experiences at any phase in life … But especially the one you’re in now, when you’ve recently grown and gained confidence. It’s not actually a good thing to peak socially in high school or college.
I’m 30 and sleep over at my besties house all the time. Tbh we’re still quite young. Trust me, I know what it’s like to have a lot of regret around your teen years. ultimately we just have to be grateful for where we’re at in the present moment.
You need to accept theres nothing to be done about that. Whats important is to not miss out on “now”.
Dont be 39 and thinking “wow, I wish I’d focused on enjoying my prime adult years instead of focusing n the past”.
Accept how you feel and move on with your life. Stop finding ways to waste time on your anxieties. Talk to your therapist. If you continue this way you will always be unhappy.
Realize that you’re 30s is an awesome time to stay connected to your inner child and feed it. And that you can still feel like a kid and do fun things on your terms with your money with the people you chose to be around and not people who were circumstantially your social circle.
Most people in general are man-children whether they admit it or not. Go back to school if you want to relive the ‘wild’ years. Het a Master’s or another Bachelor’s, nothing holding you back.
The past is the past. You can’t change it, so there’s no use in obsessing over it. Instead, think about what you want to do in the present and work on doing that.
I think you have a very idealized interpretation of youth. The reality is that many, if not most, young people are awkward and antisocial. They aren’t all going out to parties, making friends, etc. If you look at social media it might seem that way, but that is not reality.
You are 29, so you have 40+ years of life left. Don’t let those years get ruined by regrets.
You accept it and make the best of your time going forward. If you waste *this* time worrying about the past, 5 years from now you’ll be worrying that you wasted *this* part of your life, and so on.
Also, do you feel like you missed out because you wanted to do those things, or because you feel like you had to have done them?
>I thought I at least had a close relationship with my sister (25F) since we routinely have deep talks, but I recently realized that she has a much different and more “fun” relationship with her high school friends because they experienced a lot of wild and formative things together.
Then cherish the relationship you *do* have instead of tainting it with your regrets of it not being different. Nowhere do you or her say that this relationship is *bad*, just another type of closeness.
Right now you’re in danger of falling into the same trap: you worry about not having done something, which prevents you from making the best out of the present. The only way out is to break this pattern by figuring out what you want to do now and work towards that goal. Regrets are unproductive if you don’t use them as learning experiences to manage your present and future.
You cannot go back to wasted years. Where you are in life now, that is the starting point of where to steer your life should be. Those who anchor their lives on the wasted past often look for reasons why they can achieve something big and something good for them.
I had my “transformative” phase a little earlier than you but I had no significant connections in high school and the first few years of socializing were agonizing and I was painfully awkward. You can have the memories you want now! Just unfortunately not with your sister – she’s wrong about that not being something that can develop later in life, she I just doesn’t want to with the place she’s in in life (fair enough). But that doesn’t invalidate the relationship you do have or what you can now build with others. To be honest a lot of the stereotypical “youth” experiences are hyped up way too much. In themselves they are not that statisfying, their value lies more in giving you that sense of “I did that “ which I’m fully confident you can get now. You’re not “old”! I agree with the poster that said you’re at risk of falling into another anxiety trap. All the best to you!
Chiming in to say I haven’t got any friends left from secondary school either and only a handful from university. Gaining and losing friends is part of the normal ebb and flow of life. On the one hand you’re lucky if you’re able to keep friends for decades, but on the other hand I’d be wary that maybe you’re overlooking problems in the relationship just for the sake of keeping it. It can go both ways and I’ve definitely seen both scenarios play out.
I’m 29 and incredibly close with people I only met two years ago, and some I’ve known for years but the friendship has suddenly grown much deeper in the last couple of weeks. You’ve gotta remain open to opportunities to connect. I also just had a wild 10 days of partying at a festival so like … fun and friends are for all ages, don’t limit yourself because of some idea of what it means to be (nearly) 30.
And I’ve gotta say I strongly disagree with your sister. What a depressing thought that you might never be truly close to someone just because you didn’t spend some arbitrary phase of your life together. Imagine the connections she’d be passing up with a mindset like that…