friendships

For someone like me who suffers from a borderline disorder, the topic of ‘friendships’ is always something that is not easy to explain or understand, because people are often mysterious beings.

I've never had many friends in all the years I've lived here. Real friends I had 10 pieces and that's not so much for the fact that I'm already 40 years old. Today I have real friends on the Internet rather than here on site. People I've never seen before. I don't have any real friends right now.

It is so that you can get used to everything and in no way is something somewhere that you then miss. I mean, I've never been the big, sociable guy, but I've appreciated it when I had friends and acquaintances near me or what to do with them. With the amount of people I know now but don't see, that's not much easier.

It's always the case that I just know how people stand with me and I always feel like you don't like me. Although I am always nice and friendly and also get niceness and kindness back, but I am always thinking about whether this is real, what he does, or whether he just does so.

It's always like this: I don't ask, I look around and observe and then I am always perceived as very calm and introverted. I'm basically not that – I'm a funny and sociable person, but I always have to look, observe and see if the person sitting opposite me is also what I think he is and is not hostile to me. This is very stressful in the long run.

With this so-called (I always call it) ‘friend/enemy’ recognition, I have just achieved good results and have often and much been able to make the decision for me whether the person who is towards me means good or bad to me. But it is very hard and dealing with people is very exhausting for me in the long run, so that I can often not endure this for more than a few hours a day. Especially now after the stroke, it is particularly difficult for me, as long as the concentration is maintained, it is downright hard work to be able to observe everything around you.

It starts when I eat an ice cream, watch how the people around me behave, what they could say and think, so that I can protect myself, because if a big, obese, young man sits there, eats an ice cream and then also with whipped cream, it is certainly no wonder that he is so fat. Unfortunately, I have heard this many times and am therefore also highly sensitive.

These are all things that would make it very difficult for me to deal with other people and I always behaved differently when too many foreign people I could not assess were around me. I'm sure you can't make friends like that. So you can't build friendships, because everyone realizes that I am different and that I behave differently and that I am inhibited and don't give myself naturally.

I have always admired my sister, how easy and carefree she approached other people and so could always make new friends and meet interesting people. I've never been able to discover like this before, because I always had to look, left, right, what do you think? What does he say? This has learned my attention and more and more on everything around me than on the other person and the other person notices that.

Even if I have anesthetized myself with alcohol or other substances, this mechanism is not to be stopped with me. Sure, then I'm much looser, but still I get everything around me and that's something that others always find very admirable, which I notice for small things about the other person, but it always strains me a lot and so I like to sit there alone for myself, although I'm actually the sociable person.

In times when I could be carefree, I had the status as a ramp, as someone who does everything and gives everything, but now it's the way it is and even if I would like it to be different, how should I get out of my skin? So I live a life that I know so well and where I don't always have to make an effort and that presupposes that I have to deal with few people, but it's okay for me.

Many think yes when they get to know me that maybe I'm even very arrogant or a little off-putting because I react the way I react. There are moments when I really long for attention and interpersonality, but unfortunately this is not always there or not bearable for me. That's how it is even when a partner notices that I'm not always the way I am. Now this is not always as easy to explain as he is for someone who is sick with Borderline, because he does not know what he is right now, but I have experienced again and again that people around me have told me that I am now different than usual and these were always moments when many people were around me.

There are things I would like to change here and there, e.g. I would like to be much more relaxed when dealing with other people. It is even the case that when I was with my in-laws, even there I was always very tense and tense, because, although I knew that they liked me, I did not know that emotionally and often felt something different there, although the knowledge that we conveyed something else and this dichotomy is very, very exhausting with time, because I have to check again and again what is what.

This is also the reason why I am now very critical of alcohol, because it reduces my ability to estimate. What is, it leads to me being much more relaxed and relaxed, but also to the fact that I have to make even more effort to find out who is friend or enemy. What then ends in an average of tenseness and alcohol again and that is not exactly easy, because it is each time a different level. It's a very complicated thing.

So my conclusion is that I will try again and again to feel as comfortable as possible in the presence of other people, even if there are many fears, but I do not give up that at some point I will also be able to be with other people for a long time without always wondering what they are right, thinking or feeling – or whether they think badly about me. That I just don't care because I know there's only that they think I'm nice or the opposite.

Do you also know such situations or do you have such experiences?

Your Sasha

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