internalized
I think I have internalized being a friendless person too much.
Yes, lacking social connections at times in your early life has knock-on effects later on, sure. But it’s also a hard habit to kick to even acknowledge you have friends when you fix it later on. I am so in this mindset of only ever being a temporary thing, a replacement, a someone’s gf, a circumstance friend, a proximity hire if you will, that I can’t process the fact that I might be neither. That I might have the real deal now, that this might be people I stick to for 10 years, possibly longer, and that they like me for me.
I don’t think I would truly grasp that if I had it. I might have it right now, but I think I’ll only know when I lose them. Then I’ll look back and think: That was really it. They were true friends but I didn’t see it because I was so connected to my identity as a friendless, lonely person that only gets people to care about her romantically.
I don’t know how to act towards people who are the real deal. I don’t know who I am if I can truly have friends. I got so used to it all and settled for less that I don’t know what to do with more.
If you resign yourself to a friendless life and never bother to learn how to keep people and be a good friend and have some social skills, you’re suddenly underprepared for when life drops people into your lap and you might fumble the lucky bag.
I don’t know how to interact with people longterm platonically. I only know romance and sex. If people liked me at all in the past, they liked me a ton like that. Don’t know how to keep relationships going that never go that far. Where do people draw the line? Not that I am romantically or sexually interested in any of them, but I mean intensity of contact, frequency of messages, limits of information and vulnerability. All I’ve known is the romantic levels to it all. I don’t know what’s too little or too much in a friendship.
I have to be careful that holding on to an image of who I am or what my life was like isn’t ruining my future.