I just had a total revelation.

Being depressed the last few….I don’t even know what, when I finally confessed to my friends it was because I was lonely and isolated, I expected….something. I thought, for at least a minute, they’d make more of an effort to spend more time with me. I just wanted to feel like someone cared, I guess, or at least a break from staring at the 4 walls of my apartment…

And what happened was not that. One friend said she didn’t know how to help, and I was not very good at articulating what I needed. The other friend made a bunch of promises he didn’t keep. My third friend is pregnant so she can’t really do anything anyway, due to the pandemic she is not going out or having people over and that’s understandable. The more I wallowed, the more depressed I got, the more my thoughts got dark, I started to believe that I’m just not very good company, because no one ever wants to be around me.

Over the last couple of days I started to get angry as well as sad. I felt resentment building up because they COULD help, they just WEREN’T. And how could they not know what I need, because I TOLD THEM. If a friend of yours said they were feeling lonely wouldn’t you make an effort to spend time with them? I started to feel that righteous anger that comes from being slighted – **I** would care about **THEM** and they’re jerks for not caring about **ME.**

Tonight I was making dinner when my old roommate popped into my mind. We were the best of friends – sat next to each other at work, hung out all the time, got boyfriends together, broke up with said boyfriends together, partied together, etc. Moving to Austin was her idea – I wanted to go to Los Angeles, she wanted to go to New York. She sent me an article that said Austin was a great city to be young & single in, and we said fuck it, let’s do it.

Fun fact – I had never actually been to Austin before I moved here.

Sadly our friendship deteriorated rapidly when we got here – there are a lot of reasons why that I won’t get into, but at the end I remember she was very lonely and depressed. And the more she tried to make that my problem the more I resented her for it – I was making friends, finding new stuff to do, and while she did try it just seemed like it never clicked for her. And from her end, it must have been incredibly frustrating because I **COULD** have helped her, I just **DIDN’T** – and she didn’t understand why. From my end I felt like she was putting too much on me. It was like everything was fraught with this heaviness, if I didn’t want to go do something with her it was a personal, soul-crushing blow and I resented not having the freedom to do what I wanted.

Reading that, I feel like an asshole. I am sure from her perspective I totally was. I should have tried harder to understand how she was feeling.

Anyway I said all that to say this, the realization I had tonight is that my friends don’t want to and cannot fix this, not because they are assholes, but because this has to be on me. If I let this corrosive resentment develop and continue to make this their problem it will actually drive them away. It’s ok to wish they made more of an effort to hang out without making it to be deliberate personal attack.

So….I don’t exactly know what to do about this. In the past I’ve just tried to jam-pack my life with activities to not notice the emptiness but that’s not really available to me (stupid pandemic) so I guess I’ll have to find an alternative, which may possibly include prozac if my doctor will give it to me.