Let me preface this by saying that I am in NO way being braggadocios or “full of myself.”
I pride myself on being the type of person that doesn’t say how good of a person or friend I am. I let my actions do the talking. I prove it each and every day. At age 29, I’ve met a lot of people in my life. And I’ve had far too many come in and out of my life. But I’ve never understood why people end up treating me the way that they do.
People tell me all the time how I’m an amazing friend and they think it’s awesome having a friend they know they can depend on and trust. Yet, somehow I either get tossed to the side for some asshole that will just use them for whatever they can provide and once they’re bored, they’re on to the next, or a situation is engineered to give the other person an excuse to stop associating with me. I don’t get it. I’m not a bad person. I’m extremely generous. I go out of my way to help others. If you pick up the phone at 3am, I’m there no matter what. I’m the person you can come to with your darkest secrets or deepest fears. I’m the one who will protect your name when you’re not in the room. But almost every “friend” that had entered my life, has crossed me and left me hanging high and dry. It baffles me almost as much as it hurts me.
I keep telling myself that I’m just going to start being the asshole that doesn’t give a shit about anyone. But, the truth is I don’t have it in me. I’m not built that way. I can’t help it. I am who I am and I can’t change the foundation of my personality and character. And it’s literally the one thing that’s hurting me. What makes it worse is knowing that I don’t deserve it.
I hate isolation. I’m at my absolute lowest mentally when I’m isolated and don’t associate with anyone. I try so hard to keep from isolating myself because of the feeling I get when I’m alone. I don’t need to go into the specifics because everyone in this subreddit knows what I’m talking about. But it’s looking like I don’t have a choice. Because if I don’t isolate myself, I’m going to keep getting hurt. I just wish someone actually gave a damn about me like I give a damn about them. People say they care, but their actions speak for themselves. This world and this life can be so unfair. So hurtful. Sometimes, I wish I could just go away. Forever…
3 comments
For me personally it’s really hard to be around people who can’t be comfortable on their own. I can sense it when a person is being “a good friend”, because they’re desperate for attention, and they’re creating a scenario where I owe them.
You don’t have to isolate, but you can work on how heavily you depend on others to feel good. Personality is not set in stone. It’s programmed. If it’s making you miserable, it’s time to debug.
I hear you. But it’s surprising how little thinking goes into people’s behaviour, and to further expect that this thinking includes your best interests (e.g. reciprocatation of being considerate) I feel might be setting the bar quite high. We sometimes need to assess what’s going on objectively, instead of from our perspective.
It seems you place a lot more importance on the good you do for others, more so than they do. I think this dynamic is quite a dangerous one, because before the relationship even starts to grow, you’ve already established yourself as the one who has more to lose. Not that anyone should consciously think this when building relationships, but in retrospective, this is a fact. And this directly affects your negotiation power, which directly affects how little control you have over how that relationship makes you feel.
Suppose people lose 80% of all the relationships they’ve been part of over their life. So in the ‘average’ persons case, let’s say its a 50/50 split between being the controller vs the controlled. When they lose 80% over time, they only really find themselves worse off half the time, which is overall 40% of their total. You, however, are the controlled one 100% of the time – when you lose your 80%, you’re going to come up worse in all of them.
This is enough to make you feel like this is unfair, and that you deserve better, but the way you’re looking at it is misleading. Given that they left, and that this made you feel bad, you’re assuming that they left because they wanted you to feel bad. But they just left, where you established yourself on the spectrum before they left is the same place you find yourself after they left, and thats under your control.
Set healthy boundaries, learn to say no, understand that if someone values you, they would not want to put themselves in a position to risk losing you, so if they bounce once you start making these changes, you were never really valued in the first place. Its better to have few friends but know who your enemies are, than to have many friends and not know which of them are your enemies.
It isn’t easy, but nobody wants to help you, only you can do this, and you owe it to yourself much more than you owe a 3am callout to anyone else. You got this 💪
You should find people who are similar to you.It’s not easy most people are assholes.if they can’t see your value find people who can.In my experience friendship with opposite sex works better for me,when I’m too nice to same sex friends they act like they are above me.
Also don’t do something nice unless other person do first.your kindness is valuable don’t scatter that to people who don’t deserve it.