Sharing Our Innermost Thoughts

This is my first time opening up online…
I think this maybe a long post…

First i think i should tell you about myself… i am a guy with a type A personality… my parents had to switch places quite often which lead me to study in many schools and not really make any concrete friends… i also have trust issues… i have no experience in dating or even talking about dating… i have been in college for a while… I used to focus solely on my career and used to think that dating on campus is a distraction and it doesn’t seem to be anything worthwhile as we will all be leaving soon to work elsewhere. Also I am a pessimist… I look at the worst in myself always… i feel like I don’t know anything or i don’t look good(though this thought really came up recently)… and then i usually spiral down a thought process which ends with me thinking about my existence and i get suicidal… though I have only thought about it and never really tried it… i usually divert these thoughts or suppress them by crying out on my pillow or listening to my favourite artist or watching tv shows… and i get stressed about exams which is usually the precipitating factor…

But then covid came… i started spending time with myself and actually thinking what have I been doing with my life… have i only been studying without even making friends… i have a friend circle but i am just shy i act like I am just a normal person and hide my real self and thoughts… i have been doing that for years now… so everyone doesn’t know this side to me but they probably know that I am not actually how they think i am…
About 1½ year back since covid i started texting and talking more with these friends about our common interests… then a year back a more closer knit group of us began to hang out… I didn’t think much of it but I enjoyed going out with them for food or to the movies or just an outing… but then one of the girls and I used to text a lot… I used to send her more texts but she used to respond to them too… I didn’t think much of it initially. I was just glad that I had someone to interact with who was interested in what I like… we gradually began hanging out more but all we talked about was the topics and slightly about each other
… as I spent more time with her though I began thinking about other things like how she looks or what she wears… and sometimes when in conversation someone mentions how good she looks so i started to take notice of her. I felt she looks really nice and pretty too… and my heart started to race when she scolded me for something or when she sat next to me… or when I was telling her something and my eyes and her eyes met… i started feeling different… this began around 3-4 months back… i started thinking that what is wrong with me… we are just friends i shouldn’t be thinking of these stuff… she even once told me that she had dated in the past too and it was a bad experience… so I was like what is this i am feeling is it an infactuation am i just attracted to her… so I started to think more about it bit by bit day by day… while not even showing the slightest indication of my thoughts to her… but it just kept building up… I began to tell her a bit about my other insecurities and the way that she helped me think about them or the fact that she thought the same way too made me feel good… there wasn’t any sign that she was attached to me… most of the time we used to just hangout with friends but at some point we started going for short walks just the two of us after dinner maybe talking about the weather or school or life… i wanted to confirm my feelings so i started thinking even more deeply… when an exam season started a really stressful one… i saw myself wanting to talk with her more and i really felt that I liked her… but I didn’t want to ruin our relationship as it was the first time I got this close to someone… so i just kept it inside as things started getting bigger within me… i started imagining things like how it would be if we actually dated… if we held hands or if she was feeling stressed i would talk to her and help her figures things out… i wanted to protect her and i started to see how I would change if we dated i would be more responsible about my academics i would help her too… she herself seemed equally or even more messed up than me so I thought that if I tried I could help her too she could become a better person… there were a lot of other negative thoughts to coming up like what will others think of us… Like will she even like me, what is there to like about me I am just a coward with no backbone or experience… while she may have her own preferences… she talks to other guys too and their they talk more i felt flirtaciously though the other guys are already dating someone else… i thought it would be impossible for her to like me so why ruin our friendship completely… in the midst of all this i started watching all these romance shows to try and understand myself and my situation better… though I knew that these things aren’t even close to reality… i started to feel anxious and i had no one to talk to… it felt too painful to keep it in me… it didn’t bother my daily life much… just when we talked… other than that I was fine able to talk with others normally… i felt that I need to talk to someone but i had no one to talk to… No one but her… so i started asking her about her dating life… or in general some topics about relationships or songs and their meaning…like what she had gone through… she told me a bit about it… how it had gone awry… how she is such a bad person…
then the exams were finally over… she wanted to go home during the leave i told her I will be too bored without her and her other girlfriends also wanted to stay and she changed her mind and stayed… but then we get bored staying at college and just studying… and her parents anniversary was coming up so she went home… I began to miss her badly… I kept asking what she is doing and what she had eaten or what did they plan to do… when is she coming back… she had initially planned to come back later but maybe because of my constant nagging or others nagging or she felt she couldn’t study at home… she decided to come home earlier… she asked me(like we always do when we return from home) if i wanted any food item too… she even asked me a day before she came when I had asked her what time she will be coming back. We were joking about something and in the flow of the conversation she asked if I missed her and i just couldn’t hold back and I said in a very cute and longing way “fine i missed you”… she then came back and we started to hang out more… in my mind my thoughts became more bold… I was like this pain i feel of holding back it hurts too much… should I just tell her how I feel… I began searching about how to confess to someone… then one day I pulled up my courage and said that tonight the both of us were planning to hang out somewhere and i would try figuring things out and asking her somehow if she was interested in dating me and somehow confessing my feelings… but due to some unexpected events the whole evening began with a delay… It got me more nervous… so i asked her like what do all these people in campuses dating actually think about in the long term… and i told her all my concerns in third person… she told me that see these type of things come with time and if you like someone and they are a good friend then the only way out is you suffer all the way or you take a leap of faith and it ends up going good or it goes bad… Talking this as a stimulus… as we were leaving the venue i confessed to her… I said I liked her… initially she was like yeah sure(because I had just asked her like how do we take that leap of faith and she had told me that just say you like the person, so she thought I was just practicing)… but then I said I am serious… then she was like wait seriously… so then we were walking out and i had just realised that because of that unexpected event we still had a long way to go back… so no WWE had to walk 20mins after my confession so we began to talk… she told me that she had no idea that I thought of her this way… then i was like yeah I have been covering up for a while now… then she was since when… then i told her the duration… then we started laughing about the whole situation… Then at some point in our conversation she told me that she never thought of me that way and that she would need time to think about me like that and decide… and also since we had our final exams coming up in a couple of weeks the timing was quite off and i had taken it into consideration when I was holding back… that I didn’t want this to affect her… i had thought that this will probably mess up her schedule and we don’t even have much time to hangout… but after the exams we would all go home… and after that we will have to start doing our internship and we maynot be able to meet each other… so i thought it was now or never… after explaining the same thing she told me that… " are you sure you like like me… i mean i am me and i am completely messed up… i am manipulative… but i am a people pleaser too… like did you get the wrong meaning from any action of mine…" i was like no… I didn’t think about anything she had said in the past as a positive reaction… it was just me who had these feelings about her… and I couldn’t hold them back anymore… she mentioned that this probably not a good time… and that if i still wanted to reconsider my emotions and act like this never happened then we can go back to how it was before… she told that just talk to me like before… give me some time to think about it and after the exams we can discuss it further… the exams were going to take another one and a half month atleast by the way… and that is where our conversation had ended… so I went back to my place and started to think about the whole thing in retrospect… i felt immensely guilty about it… i felt that I had not thought enough about the consequences and i felt that I had dropped a bomb in her life… i had actually never felt that bad and my chest really felt stuffy… i tried to act like before by sending her some song or an article about something we talked about… it was so out of context… we had agreed that we would talk and figure things out… but i remembered that she needed time afterall she had never even thought of me like this before… so i decide to follow her advice and fornthe next two days while feeling like trash I kept send ing her messages like before some were out of context… we were forced to meet each other too as our friend circle hangs out… i was too guilt ridden that I began acting awkward in front of her… i did some mistakes in public too… Like forgetting to sign somewhere… and i think she took note of all this… i still kept asking her if she was fine… i told her I am sorry about all this and that she can take her time and that I would wait patiently… but the one day and one night of the confession… it was getting too much for me to hold back… i had lost my appetite and had lost my sleep too and i think she noticed it… so i really wanted to tell her that I am not feeling well but i wanted to give her her space and not force her… but the she herself messaged me saying that we should talk or atleast i should talk to someone about this and not keep it to myself… but i told her that I had no one to talk to but her… so then she was like fine then talk to me only… the moment she said that I felt so relieved for some reason… i had even cried just a day before… so we decided to meet up… after not being able to see her for so long I felt really glad when we met… it relieved so much of the pressure on my chest… so the. I opened up and told her what I had been thinking… she told me that she never thought that I could be like this and think like this too… she wanted to know the new me better… so she asked me what I liked about her… so i mustered up the courage and told her some points… her reaction was really positive she seemed to have really liked those compliments and her face also changed a lot… it felt like a new side of her that I hadn’t seen before… i expressed my concerns and told her what I had been through… she also told me that she actually had had a pretty bad relationship a couple of years back and that she had just recovered from it half a year back… and this situation had actually bought her to tears after she recalled all the times that she had been through something similar to this… she told that she has had really bad experiences with guys… some guys were obsessive over her and some cheated on her… and she even cheated onsomeone once… she was like you don’t even know me at all and how could you even like me… and i was like despite hearing all that I just felt even more for her and i wanted to be there for her and help her somehow… if anything I didn’t feel that I liked her any less… but still she told me am i sure about it… i told her that it is my first time feeling this way… but i have been thinking of this for a while now and i am sure about the current state of my feelings… she then told ok she understands me… and that we should be more open and talk more about these things… i was like me too… if you ever feel anxious about all this don’t try to please me just say you don’t think it iwll work out and reject me immediately… Don’t try to go through with it just for my sake… i told her that I am an adult too so i will try and figure things out my way… So then we ended on a positive note and decided that we would have to hang out more and get to know each other better and take it slow… and u felt that was the right way too…

So for the next two days I kept talking to her like we did before but even complimented her and flirted with her and she was really receptive of everything and everything so far had been good… so it was going like this only… but since we were spending more time together one of our mutual friends began to take notice of the changes and she pretty much has really good intuition so she basically knows but didn’t say anything… i handy revealed Thai side of mine to anyone but her in the world… so I didn’t want anyone else finding out about this me… i know i sound selfish… so i told her that until we figure things out… let us not discuss it with anyone else… but then one of our friends returned from home… and he had come from a marriage of a close relative and as were talking a lot of things she had shared with him before came up… i mean i knew they were close since they were close in roll no. So he began to tease her about her past relationships and what her type is and all… and how all the guys she had met with that type had all ended up being horrible experiences… and i matched that type well too… so i started to rethink about myself… I began to worry that I would end up being the 9th guy who ended up disturbing her… she told me that it wasn’t the same… that we are older now… and that I am a better person than them… so i don’t need to worry about it… but once in a while I myself would be unsure about myself as I really like her and i didn’t want her to feel any worse… forget about the exams also… couldn’t study a word… so the situation got a bit overwhelming for me… that and in two days we would get busy and not be able to meet up anymore also made me feel impatient… also her friends began catching on to us too… and i started to feel that do i actually like her partly because of her concern in the beginning… and partly because of her past… i started thinking about what our friends would say and what could possibly happen at the end… it had been 4-5 days but I didn’t feel anything from her… i was like i know i have to be patient but there is only two days left after which we would barely talk… and also the last time we met i wanted to ask her something about a past relationship to get to understand what she is thinking but i didn’t because she told that it is too early to talk about it… and she told that let us just look at the stars tonight… i had already been anxious and also I wanted to keep getting her to like me more… but since this one meeting had gone uneventful… she was evading me and we didn’t have anything to talk about… my mind was blank… it suddenly started to feel that what was the point of this… we would not be able to talk much during the exams so if not for these two days if she doesn’t seem to even think of me that way then how could anything possibly change by then… if anything it could only go the other way… so then i started imagining how it is going to end as it didn’t seem like it would work out in my head… all this happened within a few hours… and she also knew that I must be overthinking too… i didn’t want her to get hurt or anxious about it and it to effect her studies… but i had promised that I would talk if anything happened… so i sent her a. Text saying that things are bad and that I dint think we should talk… because I have overthought the whole thing and my head is a messs… but she still called she td me to tell her everything… initially itself since we had talked about my insecurities and i had warned her that I overthink too much… i told her that if she learned my line of thought she wouldn’t ever be able to see me in another light… but she told she wanted to know… so i explained my whole spiral… she seemed very emotionallybstressed by the end of it… she said she felt both sad angry and offended… she felt that I underestimated her too much as a friend… she told that even if something like that happened we would still be able to talk about it… but i said that I don’t think i will… i told her that no matter how i think ofnit i still like her… it isn’t some superficial emotion or mistake… and i felt that given her situation she shouldn’t go through all this and just tell me to go away… I didn’t want this to affect her… i ahd already made a mess of her life… and stretching this through exams might mean that we could breakdown during the exam which would lead to disastrous consequences… i told her that it is right that she has just gotten 5 days to think of me this way… and it is my fault for holding back instead of giving hints or testing the waters… but i was afraid i would loose a friend… i don’t think given the timing things would ever work out… she is till worried about opening up because of her past trauma while I am already too deep into this and too cautious wanting her not to get disturbed… i want to move faster and she wants to move slower… i know i am in the wrong and i want to be patient… i don’t even have anyone else to talk to other than her… she tells me to talk to others… i tell her that it was hard enough for me to open up to her… i don’t think i want to talk to anyone else… i feel it will make it worse just like when the friend talked about her past… all our friends are more close to her… i feel they will never understand me… they may dissuade me and convince me my feelings aren’t real… even i have been double guessing myself… but no matter what I can’t seem to think that I don’t like her… so this is the status of the situation now… she says she isn’t affected by all this and not to wrroy about it… she will priorities her studies… she has been through this before… and is telling me to do the same… i don’t want to force her to open up to me… but i just can’t patient anymore…

Please help me guys… i have removed a lot of the details and typing this took a while and was painful… i may have made a mistake recalling my memories too… i am very fragile so I hope for sincere replies… and do sugar coat things a bit pls…