| I totally get it - I haven't made many friends since covid. > Nobody wants to get my loser failure filth on them, they are all afraid they will be associated with me and nobody wants that. It's why my wife left me. This kind of language does not help. If you talk about yourself this way, even hyperbolically, you will feel this way about yourself. > I don't know how to tell people that I have nobody else without sounding pathetic. You don't need to - perhaps you have friends from university (if you went) or school. If you don't have any friends or colleagues that you have even a passing acquaintance with, you could try meetup (especially in the US, it's a good platform). Just go see some people. If you're worried about sounding pathetic, it might be easier to do a group activity, so you're less likely to get into a deep emotional conversation. If you can't find a group activity, find a local charity that's doing a litter pick or something similar. You could also sign up for a class of some kind at a local community college or arts centre. I hear pottery can be very therapeutic. EDIT: I've read some of your other comments about how hard it is to build meaningful friendships. It is hard. It can shake your sense of belonging to the core when you discover that people you thought were going to be friends for life end up not being around anymore. However, not all friendships need to have a deep meaningful connection. It can be nice to just see people on a semi-frequent basis to do an activity together. It's certainly a good start. |
I am also kind of fearful of leaning on people too much.
Getting to see more people regularly has helped with the deep meaningful vs casual acquaintance thing. Right now it's a battle of attrition to have enough opportunities that some more significant opportunities can happen organically.
The harder I try to force it the less progress I make. It's very difficult to deal with even being able to observe it. A perverse target fixation.