Charleemanderz Fan #1

I often times feel alone when I am surrounded by the most people. I feel like it’s too difficult to connect to people and it just takes too much effort. I’ve gotten really attached to a streamer and their community and they have helped me a lot but I know I can’t rely on them for everything forever. I feel selfish because I always want everyone to like me when I know that’s not really their job. They can like me if they want to. It’s just so hard to make friends. How can I get past this and connect with people while I’m at twitch con?

It’s so difficult to feel like you have such a great need and so little in your life that can help satisfy that need…to feel like the only reliable place is this community you’ve connected with, but then it’s contaminated with this fear that you’ll be too much and they’ll leave you like everyone else…what a brutal catch-22…you connect, but then you fear they’ll reject you, so you only partly connect, which makes you feel disconnected anyways…it’s a vicious cycle of loneliness. You long so deeply to find friends who you can feel safe with, but it’s so hard to trust that they’ll stay, that they’ll love you as you are, because you haven’t had much experience with that kind of unconditional and lasting love.

And I gotta tell you – I feel this so hard, haha. Feeling like relationships are always fleeting, like they naturally have this expiration date slapped on the side of them, and that the thing that really spoils the meat is that I stink…that people really don’t love me, and they won’t stay because of me. You are not alone in this at all. I think one of the critical things I’m finding is that the key to finding friends isn’t actually finding others that love me, but it’s finding love for myself…I’ve noticed that the more I accept myself, the easier it is that others accept me – not even that they weren’t accepting me before, but because when they did accept me, I couldn’t accept their acceptance of me because I couldn’t accept any acceptance of me…I couldn’t believe I was worthy of anyone’s love…so when it came, when they loved me, I didn’t believe it and I pushed it / them away…which is really hard to have friends when you’re stiff arming them haha.

So what I’ve learned is that friendship starts with learning to love and accept myself…which would point to some good questions you could engage with before TC19 – what keeps you from accepting yourself? Where does your self-reproach come from? Why don’t you trust others when they love you?

These would be good Qs to dive into with a counselor. We actually have a partnership with an online counseling service called BetterHelp that could match you with a counselor and help you dig in to these Qs and prep you for TC…you get a week free on HeartSupport, which is like $70 normally, so that’s pretty sweet. I have a BH counselor, and she’s a freaking magician…she’s helped me learn to accept myself in greater degrees than I’ve ever experienced before, and it’s a beautiful peace and freedom that I’m savoring. You can get that free week at heartsupport.com/betterhelp and you sign up for a profile, they’ll match you to a counselor, then you sign on and message them to schedule a meeting which you can do over voice or video, whichever you prefer.

And if not there, write back here and tell me more about what your thoughts are related to the above Qs. This is a good place to start :slight_smile:

Thank you for being courageous enough to open up.

-Nate

i dont have much actual advice or much to say right now, but wanted to pass on a heart anyway <3

you’ve got great self-awareness, and are very thoughtful. im rooting for you! c:

I responded to this on stream <3 Thank you so much for sharing.

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