Well I certainly haven't added anything to here in quite awhile & it seems this has become where I end up putting things down when I've done everything else I can think of to deal with them. I wish I could say that this was going to be an uplifting entry in which I say how well I've been doing and that's why I haven't really updated this thing in more than a year but as you can probably guess by the title that is not what this is going to be.
I've really been struggling with loneliness lately and it seems to be getting worse, the answer to that for most people would be obvious why not just call a friend either to chat or plan to get together or failing those chat with friends online. I honestly wish it was that easy for me but in my case there are a few things that complicate matters, probably by far what causes the most problems for me is that for me personally a large part of my struggles with depression is a feeling of worthlessness and so by extension the feeling that I am just a bother/annoyance/burden to anyone. The result of that is that I have an incredibly hard time really asking anyone for anything especially ironically friends or other people that I respect or would really want to talk to as my friends are the ones that I would want to bother/annoy the least so it makes it harder to reach out to the people that would normally be the first ones to reach out to. On top of that sometimes I start having problems figuring out what to say in conversations, as mentioned above I'm always afraid that I am just bothering/annoying them & they are only putting up with me either because they are really nice people or they just feel sorry for me, so I often don't say a lot of things I might really want to talk about for the reasons I listed or if it is something relating to me feeling left out/lonely/etc I'll worry that they think I am blaming them for it. To further add to all of that since I'm unemployed I have nothing but time on my hands while most people are very busy and often they don't really have a lot of time to themselves which of course just increases my feelings of being a pain and a bother. Due to all of the above there are actually very few people that I would feel even remotely comfortable calling, or even sending less intrusive (ie email, some type of DM, basically anything they can check on their own time rather then a call which demands immediate attention) to suggest getting together, and even with them I tend to be very hesitant & don't try to set anything specific.
Now all of the above I have struggled with for quite awhile and in some cases and at sometimes I am better at trying to push myself to be a little more outgoing whereas other times I tend to fall back into a more withdrawn stance, sadly it is usually during those times that I often feel the most lonely and the most in need of connection and conversation. Lately I've been feeling that way more and more to the point where there are times when I seem to just switch between things like Twitter, Facebook and email in the hopes that someone has said/sent me something or that there is someone on one of them that I might feel comfortable enough to try to engage in conversation. I used to do this then just jump back to whatever I was watching/playing/reading etc without much issue and then check again either when I was done or in an hour/few hours but lately I've been having a harder time getting back into these things rather then just cycling through the things listed above sometimes almost desperate for conversation but at the same time not wanting to expose anyone to myself.
I don't want to give the impression that everything is bleak and depressing all the time, I have actually met a few people that even though I don't really know them well and they don't really know me have been very kind and have actually really cheered up me at sometimes even though they probably don't know that but again sometimes that can itself be a double edged sword as while it is great it can sometimes make it tougher to deal with returning to what is normal for me.
Fan Expo is coming up this week which is one of the things that prompted this entry as, especially these days, it is definitely the most social interaction I get probably all year even though I generally spend most of it on my own & only rarely end up talking to people if I happen to run into someone that I know. Due to having been feeling so withdrawn of late & partly because there isn't as much I really want to see as in previous years I came very close to deciding to just forget about it and say home but I think I would have really regretted it in the end if I had done that so while I am looking forward to it I am also a little worried about how I'll feel after getting back from it, although I think I still would feel worse at the end if I hadn't gone knowing I missed it. So it should be interesting, anyway I just figured I'd getting this all out of my head & on here.