Originally posted by dave134
College has sucked for me and I've been mildly depressed for a while. I've finally made a few good friends so I'm getting happier, but things still suck. Anyways, I am in my senior year. Making friends takes a lot of energy for me so I don't see the point in putting all that effort forward only to have most of these friends move away after the school year and hardly see them ever again. The way I look at it, no matter what I do this year, I'm still going to graduate and go back to where I live and be in the same situation having few friends....what should I do?
Is this REALLY the issue here? That you're going to lose these friends? If so, the problem is that you're thinking so far into the future that you're missing TODAY.
I mean, you're going to die one day, so why do ANYTHING?
EXPERIENCE. You're head's so far out in front of your feet that you're gonna fall flat on your face. The future doesn't exist. It's something you've created in your head to understand the progression of experiences in your life. All that exists is TODAY. Stop trying to steer the future and start worrying about NOW.
Personally, though, I think the whole "I'm just going to lose them eventually" is just an excuse for you to give in to your SAD. You're better than that.
Your fears and anxiety have no business interfering with your self-image. Act in a way that expresses WHO YOU ARE instead of a way that gets you WHAT YOU WANT. You may think that companionship is what you want, but your fears are part of what you want, too. You want safety from physical and mental abuse. The catch is that you can CHOOSE whether you want to give control to those fears, or address them, or ignore them completely and, by doing so, render them inert.
Fear serves its purpose...it's kept us alive for a very long time. But fear, like any other emotion or phsyiological function, is just a resource. You can choose whether to use it or not, based on your self-concept. Most people use it way too often because it's an easy tool to use and it WILL fix the situation, but it won't fix it in the way you like and it inhibits other self-functions.
And DEFINITELY don't sit there and analyze it...you're not going to understand it because it's not a sensible thing. Neither is attraction, or attention, or perception, or anything else at that level. Any time you sit there trying to analyze fear, you're wasting resources you could be using to socialize, make new friends, enjoy new experiences, deal with complex problems, and develop new skills.
And once you develop those new skills...you'll find that you're more than capable of dealing with any social damage that anyone less-adjusted than you can throw at you. So even though that threat exists, you don't need to use fear to deal with it any more.
And trust me, it doesn't happen all that often, social damage that is. But in order to develop these skills, you DO have to put yourself at risk.
No one said life was easy.
