For the past year I’ve been feeling so much anxiety. It comes and goes, but lately it has been around a lot and disappears for only one day to one week until it comes back again. I have a friend group of three (including me) and we’ve had some troubles trying to understand each other’s behaviours and thoughts in many different areas.
The reason why I suffer from anxiety is because I fear being left out and becoming abandoned by my friends. All the time I feel like most of the things I say and do are somehow wrong, for example my opinions. Sometimes I get eye-rolling, weird looks and passive-aggressive answers and now and then I feel like I’m being left out of the whole conversation when it’s the three of us.
Nowadays I’m afraid to even talk sometimes because I fear I will get these reactions from my friends. Most of my life I’ve desperately tried to avoid conflicts but it seems like there always appears to be at least one (rarely major unes, but still) when we three discuss about anything. When it’s only two of us, it’s easy and nice, but when we’re all together the atmosphere is often tense and slightly judging.
Does any of you suffer from a similar situation? Or has suffered? Please tell me about it and if you have solutions or ways to ease the anxiety, I’d be more than happy to hear about them. In case it matters, we are all adults in my friend group.
So, I don’t know if my experience matters because I had this issue for the most part of my school life and up until college. I used to feel anxious and I don’t know if what I used to experience was anxiety or not. But I think the only thing I realised is, the people I seemed to be giving importance to, didn’t give the same amount of importance to me. I was stuck in a toxic cycle for the longest time until I understood that I needed to distance myself from people in general and just focus on my career, as that would be the only thing that would help me. I started limiting my interactions with people that brought me more stress, than calm. What eventually happened is I singled out about 3-4 people who were good for my mental health. These 3-4 people are not friends with each other, but I have a one on one equation with them. I don’t really really have a gang now. And honestly, I don’t miss it. I’m at peace with my life, the people I have now are the ones I truly I care for and the ones who truly care for me in return, and probably even more. So, I don’t really know if this is a solution, but just thought I’d share my experience! Hope you’re able to find a solutions from this soon ❤️
I’m so happy to hear you’ve managed to find peace with your life and friendships, not to mention you have people around you who truly care about you ❤️ This did help me a lot actually because your situation sounds more than familiar. Actually things started to unravel right away after I posted this text and now I can only hope it will get better soon. Luckily I have a one good friend by my side.