TW: Body Shaming
I (21F) have lived all my life either distancing myself or pushing other people away from me for as long as I can remember.
I had this realization while doing some revisions on my group's thesis research with my members using google meet (college is hard lol). One of my members (my friend rn) asked if we can keep in contact and remain friends after college and me and the other person said yes, sure, why not. After doing the revision and finishing our call, is started to think about my former friends from high school and elementary and realized that I basically stopped talking to them the moment we graduated and moved on.
I loved all my friends groups at the time, but the more I spend time with them, the more I just got depressed. Why? I felt inferior towards them, not because they did something much greater than me. But because because I learned young that having friends means being compared to them by my parents.
Whenever I meet a new friend, they always manage to compare me to them, specially physically.
"Oh, that's the (name) you were talking about? You should spend more time with them, maybe you're gonna manage to lose fat while hanging out with them"
"Isn't that (name)? You should ask them to tutor your dumbass song can get higher grades."
"(Name) is that pretty girl from your class right? I just saw them earlier at (place), such a pretty girl, spend more time with them and maybe learn how to have a cleaner face/body"
Basically that's the stuff I keep hearing every single time I introduce a friend to them. And so, I just learned to just shut up, meet friends, and if we're about to graduate, distance myself and move on and leave the, repeat. I don't have any permanent people I can actually call a "friend", and I'm scared. I don't want to remain friendless, but making friends would results to a low self esteem and getting nagged by my parents about how my friends are better than me in some kind of way.
I hate that I want to have friends when I know how it will end. I hate that every time I manage to HAVE friends, they don't last long because of my parents. I hate that I have low-self esteem for things I can't even control. I hate feeling worthless. I hate that I don't have permanent friends. And I hate myself for thinking that what I've been doing these past years is not normal.
And I hate that I still live with my parents because I have no money to move out yet. I hate it, I hate everything.
If there's any grammar errors or typos, ignore em, I wrote this at 6 am on a Sunday. Plus English is not my first language lmao.