nunyanunya Posted March 24, 2011 Posted March 24, 2011 I'm going to tell you a long story tonight Loveshack. I'll try to keep it easy to read, but be warned it may come out more stream of consciousness. I need to say this to someone (if only to myself at least), and incidentally maybe someone will have some advice for me. The second long paragraph can be skipped, its provided for background on me in case you care to read it. I felt compelled to write it and feel a little better. The meat of the question starts with the college paragraph and continues to the end, in which I outline my current problem and enough background to get a feel for my position. I have moved around just about every year of my grade school life. I might say that it has affected my social development, but that would be placing blame on something I can't really understand. As it stands however, I am introverted, but yet early on in my childhood did crave social validation sometimes painfully much. After a while of yearly combating ostracizing and sometimes hostile social environments, I withdrew into myself, especially as it was painful to be continually ripped from friendships. As I got older it got worse, as the moves happened at longer intervals, resulting in a very painful rip at the end of middle school where I had stayed for 3 years and made fond memories. I was landed smack into a private school, a horrible place for someone who isn't a social butterfly, attractive, or athletic (hey I was varsity goalie at least...) I ended up making a good friend or two with whom I had a great deal of fun for all of one year until they started highschool while I remained in the private school and the class size shrunk to 14 including myself. I did not get along with any of the remaining students at all, and for a year was in social emotional lockdown. Next year I started highschool proper (once again, a completely new environ), but since it was bigger I wasn't noticed as much. In spite of myself, I made several really strong and happy connections as I found people with whom I shared many interests. Oh well, like always, we moved again at the end of that year, oddly enough back to the place we lived in middle school. Great. Now I get to recognize everyone, forget their names, and have no one know me all over again. Two years later I got to college. In college I was able to grow quite a bit, but I've always been behind my peers socially, always playing catchup. Up until this time I'd been used to dealing with small core groups of close friends, but in college there was just so much that I ended up not really developing close ties as it were. Freshman year helped to break me out of my shell, but since I began studying languages at an advanced level I quickly fell in with an older crowd as they consumed my day to day living. I still kept contact with my freshman group, but this language/exchange student environment persisted until senior year, where all of those older friends suddenly seemed to graduate at once. I tried to pick things up with my remaining friends, but I always felt like things were strained, and I understood why. Never the less, I continued to try to regrow or at least maintain things after college and seemed to have an OK time of it until I started traveling for my current job, which I've held for just about 3 years. Things dropped off, as I now found myself once again in a situation where the only solution was to maintain long distance friendships, which I've been utterly atrocious at for my entire life. But last year, my freshman roommate, who I used to consider rather close of all the college crowd, got married and didn't invite me. My memory is very bad, and as I was one of the first people he told, I might have told him I'd have travel around that time, and he might not have bothered. I feel like I would have remembered that and lamented it greatly, yet still sent them a gift or something, but as it stands I still don't know when the ceremony took place. In addition, another friend involved in this group also got married, and as we all shared mutual friends, I was once again not invited. Missing out on what could have been at college has been subtly eating at me to varying degrees for pretty much this whole time since senior year, and now that I am newly single and detached from her social group, which I was starting to get comfortable and close with, I find myself yet again, continuing to neglect the group of people who used to know me well. I have been an utter social failure for most of my life and its been the source of frighteningly deep sorrow. It used to catch me off guard, and now with Facebook I can go stalk them for christs sake and make it worse. To counteract the angst I have about it, and to hide from the regret, I've been diving headlong into work. My work ethic is praised, but I now see the feedback loop that I've been steaming through. I'm good at my job, and I feel needed and respected by most everyone there. That makes it easy to hide from the life situations I'm terrible at and cause me pain. I haven't been able to admit this until now, but somehow I doubt I'll be able to make good use of it. More acutely, last week I sent out feeler facebook messages and have actually received 1 reply out of the good handful I sent out. I might be being too anxious about it. I'm always full of anxiety when it comes to this stuff and I loath it. At this rate I'll be 30 and completely friendless. As you can tell, I don't seem to be able to hold on to friends well. I should also mention that I've had two romantic relationships with girls from my college group, one girl tightly coupled with my college group, and the other only indirectly so (this most recently ended). In the first instance, shortly after college, she got crazy and I pretty much had to break up with her. I was reassured of much of my core group after that for a while, and twice made an ass of myself as a result, for which I profusely apologized. (as a side note, it was odd that I did so, as what ended up happening was that I became so drunk that I needed to crash at my friend's place, imposing myself twice. I was completely unaware that I had done it on purpose until later, and was horrified.) The most recent breakup however was not as clean. I had to make a decision that we weren't right for each other, and in the classic sense was vilified by her good friends. I expected this, but as I had been growing close to her group for a long while it was still jarring, and as we share friends a few levels away from each other, I can only imagine all kinds of aired dirty laundry and bad mouthing. My ****ing mind likes to fantasize about horrible things if you haven't noticed. So now that I've been lately adrift, the desire to reconnect with the college group has intensified, peaking last week and right now, as I await some responses. The regret likes to tag along. As I will continue to travel with this job, I see no good outcome, as in order to make a tough choice, I'll have to yield employment I thoroughly enjoy and that keeps me interested and exposed to new things and places at the expense of my friends, or the opposite happens. I have a feeling that if I don't fix this, that I will have emotional fallout, affecting my mental and physical wellbeing. Phew, anyone read this far down? Kudos and bless you!
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