I (23F) have no friends and haven’t had since I left my friendship group (from school) during covid. At first, I wasn’t hugely bothered about my lack of friends and probably thought I’d find some as the years went by.
6 years have passed, I’ve been to university and graduated, started my first proper job, and still have no friends. I’m embarrassed by it. I worry that people must think there is something wrong with me, that I must be the problem if I’ve had so many opportunities to make friends and still haven’t.
I’m not anti-social, I like to think I’m friendly and a nice person. At uni, I made people who I considered friends but never got close enough to them to keep contact after graduating. The issue is that I developed social anxiety during the covid pandemic. Even though it’s gotten better, it hasn’t fully gone away. I know that the reason I struggle to make friends is because I don’t allow people to get to know me on a deep level. I avoid talking about my personal life with people, because I don’t want people to discover that I don’t have friends or a social life. I know it sounds stupid, and I know that I’m keeping myself stuck in a cycle.
Lately, I’ve been feeling really down about this. A colleague asked me what I do in my spare time and I said nothing much other than the gym. The same colleague recently told me that your 20s are the best time of your life and to go on as many holidays as possible with friends. I had another colleague ask me what my plans were on my days off and when I said just the gym, they replied “oh.” I felt pathetic.
I miss having friends. There are so many things I want to do, places I want to go, but I don’t want to do it alone. I’ve decided I’m going to stop pushing people away from me and let them get close to me. But I just don’t know if/when I’ll find opportunities to make friends again.