I have never been good at maintaining friendships that are meaningful. I used to hang around with all the wrong people as a teenager and it got me into all sorts of trouble. I used to be really clever at school, and was a few years above my age in things like maths when I was 12. It all went to ■■■■ because I lost interest and got into drugs and it went downhill from there. Now with this illness, I lost my two friends as I acted out when I was left psychotic for almost a year before getting proper treatment and scared them off. I have been alone for four years now, completely isolated from everyone except family. I know I was really bad at reading peoples intentions when I was younger, and basically was able to be bullied and taken advantage of until I was old enough to realise what was going on and cut myself off from people after my drugs counsellor convinced me that these people were not my friends. Now I don’t know what to do. It feels like I was already at a disadvantage when it comes to being sociable before I was diagnosed with sz, and now the stress of these kind of situations becomes too much when I experience things outside of my regular routine. I can lash out because of this, and I find it very hard to express myself to people or relate to them. Now it seems it’s just expected to be something that has to continue and I start to see little value in my life when I find it hard to connect with people enough to even get close to building a relationship with them. Time is spent just trying to behave myself and act normal so as not to raise suspicion that something my be wrong - with people at work especially. It just seems to me that I am just existing and it bothers me that I cannot connect with anyone. The main problem is that if someone did try to connect with me, I’d end up over time getting paranoid about them and their intentions and cut them off. It’s happened before and I feel really bad about it now. It’s just impossible to even consider a situation where I’d be able to build a reciprocal friendship with someone that’s meaningful and make a real change to each other. It just seems out of reach and it has got to a point now where I think that I just have to accept that I am just one of those people, a loner or whatever you want to call it. This fault is entirely on me, and now I feel like a tipping point has been reached that there is no turning back from. No one to talk to, no one to relate to. It’s an existence that will be played out quietly in the background with no noise surrounding it. I don’t know anymore if it’s the sz, me or other people. I just wish I was capable.
Wow what a long post. I read it but don’t remember all the points, that seems to be happening more and more lately. I would be your friend. Although every time I said that people ignored it. I don’t know you just have to learn to trust again. Go out on a limb and trust someone. It might be difficult to fight against that intuition but you have to keep trying.
Me personally I am in kinda the same boat as you although the reason is just that I drifted away from all my friends slowly as we moved on to different parts of our lives.
Hmm, well it seems to me your reluctance to connect with others is probably a result of not just one thing but a lot of things – the main probably being your schizophrenia, as you mentioned even if you did manage to connect to someone you’d probably end up cutting them off anyway because of your paranoia. And, you exert a lot of energy just to appear normal at your work, which is something… I can totally relate to… It sucks… and it’s so exhausting and disheartening.
And your overall experience with all your past friends probably adds quite a bit to the equation as well. It’s a really vicious thing really… trust being damaged directly by certain people then being damaged even further by something like schizophrenia.
I have had several ‘frenemies’ in my past and now that I am in a position to meet some sincere friends, I have nowhere to invite them as I live with my dad. It’s pretty awkward to invite people to hang out in your ‘room’ when you’re in your 40’s.