Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi, I feel I deeply need some friends in my life, who I can socialise with offline (face to face) sometimes.
I don't know why, but finding friends online doesn't work for me.First, I can't keep my concentration on social media or videos on screen. Second, I feel I need to see/feel people's face and reactions to capture what's heppening to our relationships. If it's all online, I recognize myself becoming too hash (critical) and sometimes I may hurt people. I think it's because I can't see others reaction. If there's a physical presense, I can sense they're hurt or laughing or confusing or... I mean I can capture more information to understand the situation.
But contrary to my needs, physical communication or going out to new place make me exhausted.At the moment I don't work (I quit last year), and this means I don't have regular opportunities socialise. I tried joining some events for the last few months (like learning tech-trends, drawing pictures...etc), but joining groups of people I always feel awkward. Like I don't know what to speak... Yes I'm very bad at small talks… Sometimes I could find a person that I can talk well if we have any common interests, we ecxchange contacts, but… I don’t know what should I do after that (sending ’thanks for a lovely talks!’ each other, and our relationships ends)
And the biggest problem for me is my energy left.Joining events physically, keep chatting people online, set time to talk to people... everything for socializing burden me so much energy.If I set a meeting with my potential future friend at a cafe on one day, or if I participate 90minutes event, that consume my whole day energy and I feel I can't do anything else on that day (I can do some routine stuffs like chores, but I can't complete any tasks that I need concentration - e.g. writing resume, learnings).This means I want to go out to find new friends, but I can't because I can't spare my energy that much for this. Because I need to live my life too.
Is it common needs of socializing in face to face?If you have any physical friends, how and where did you find them and how do you maintain your friendships for long term???
With me it’s a problem that I would like to have friends but I would like to be friends only with people who have interests similar to mine and who I could share my life experience with. My experience with NT people is that they totally don’t understand me and often gaslit me (even if not intentionally). And I struggle to find ND friends. Not all of course but for me ND people are more interesting. So i is have this problem plus I have specific expectations that make it even harder. As for now I didn’t find solutions for these problems. Currently I have no energy to socialize I often even have no energy to answer my phone or reply to a message, not using social media and still feeling tired..
> for me ND people are more interesting. I totally empathy with this feeling... but I still can't find sufficient opportunities that I can find ND who can be friends with!