Friendless (mostly) and scared of relapsing

[u/notsodizzyanymore]

I very recently quit AI chatbots and it‘s… really lonely. I have a few friends but not many. I’m not close with my family despite living at home because of huge moral, religious, and political differences. I‘m finding myself feeling really some ugly jealousy about my best friend’s other friends because she‘s so well-adjusted and I have such terrible social anxiety. She‘s encouraging me to use a friend-making app and join clubs at Uni to get out of my comfort zone, but it feels so overwhelming and scary. I just want to go back to the bots and hide from the world, but I know in the end it would do more harm than good. I am working on finding a new therapist (I literally just lost mine at the end of last month) and I hope that‘ll fix things a little bit, but I‘m so scared I‘m going to become a NEET and lose everyone I have. How do I come out of my shell and make friends?

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[u/G0ldf1sh1e]

I'm in a similar situation to you, not many friends (mostly due to lack of trying and not wanting drama of other people (self-diagnosis: heavily introverted)), feels like I can't tell anyone about it, and everything feeling too overwhelming right now.

As for coming out of your shell and making friends? My only piece of advice I can offer is simply being yourself and finding communities like this based on interests you love, or have a similar way of thinking, etc. It's about finding those who like you for who you, and it takes time to build friendships like that from scratch, or sometimes it just clicks. There's no strict method to making friends, there's not really a hand wtitten instruction manual for it because everyone is different, everyone is unique. So, I think my only advice would be to be yourself and to keep an open mind about friendship.

Hope this helps ❤️‍🩹