Am I the villain here?
I’m a 27-year-old corporate employee from Trivandrum, and I’ve been working in the same organisation for about four years. To be honest, I don’t really have any friends anymore. My best friend is my husband, and I’m very close to my sister.
This is going to be a long post, so please bear with me. I genuinely want to hear an honest, unbiased opinion because I’ve reached a point where I keep wondering whether I’m the problem. Maybe the reason I don’t have friends is because of me.
During school, I had a group of friends whom I considered family. Something changed when we moved to 10th standard, although even now I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly happened. Most of them had the same goal of cracking NEET, so they attended coaching classes together. I was the only one who didn’t. Naturally, they started spending more time together, developing their own inside jokes and experiences that I wasn’t part of. I felt increasingly left out.
I also remember feeling that they didn’t really appreciate or acknowledge me in the same way they appreciated each other. For example, if one of them wore something nice, the others would compliment her, but I rarely received that kind of appreciation. It may sound trivial, but at that age, those things mattered to me.
Then, during 10th standard, there was a class reshuffle. I ended up being completely alone without any of my friends, and I believe that triggered some serious mental health struggles for me. I started experiencing depression, and my parents eventually intervened and had me moved to another class where two of my friends were present.
Even after that, things didn't really improve. I continued feeling lonely and increasingly overwhelmed. Towards the end of the year, a major issue involving one of the girls in our group came to light, and the entire group was scrutinised. Most of them knew what was happening, but I was completely unaware of the situation. Somehow, a significant portion of the blame ended up falling on me because I had gone against the principal and moved to another class, even though my teachers had supported that decision.
The incident affected me deeply. That same day, I developed severe abdominal pain, was admitted to the hospital and eventually had to undergo surgery. I missed the final days of 10th standard. I genuinely believed my friends were devastated by what had happened to me. Later, I found out that one of them had said I was faking the stomach pain to escape the consequences of what had happened.
That completely shattered me.
I went into a very severe period of depression. After 10th, I stopped speaking to all of them and moved to another school. But the new environment was overwhelming too, and eventually I stopped going to school altogether. My parents were extremely worried. They tried changing my school, but nothing seemed to work.
Eventually, they took me to a psychiatrist, who recommended that I take a year off and repeat the academic year later. I had always been a high-achieving student, so this was something nobody expected from me. I started experiencing panic attacks and went through an extremely dark period, including suicide attempts. After a long battle, I eventually completed 11th and 12th through open schooling and had to choose humanities instead of the science path I had originally dreamed of.
I had always wanted to become a scientist. At that point, it felt like everything I had imagined for my future had been taken away because of my mental health.
Some relatives even suggested that I shouldn't be sent to college because they were afraid I would face the same problems again. But my parents believed in me and sent me anyway.
College became something of a comeback for me.
I chose English, and although I still had my struggles, I learned how to live with them. I eventually graduated as the first rank holder at Kerala University, which was something nobody expected after everything I had gone through. For me, it felt like I had finally proved to myself that I wasn't broken.
I did make a few friends in college, but I never allowed myself to form extremely deep friendships. I had developed serious trust issues. After graduation, I stayed in touch with only a few people.
Then I started working. I joined an IT company as a technical writer and genuinely enjoyed my work. I also met my then-boyfriend, who is now my husband, there.
At work, I eventually found another group of four people. Once again, I became emotionally attached to them and started considering them my family. I let my boundaries down and allowed myself to trust people deeply again.
And once again, something changed.
I had some health issues and was working from home quite often, which naturally created some distance. Around the same time, another colleague changed the dynamics within the group. He had originally been part of the group, later resigned, and eventually joined the organisation again.
When he returned, everyone was extremely happy and celebrated his comeback. I wasn't, because I had never particularly liked him and didn't feel comfortable around him. I didn't want to force myself into a situation that would hurt me emotionally, so I gradually started distancing myself from the group.
The painful part is that apparently, they didn't even notice.
Then I took a month's leave following a miscarriage. Not one of them checked on me.
When I returned to work, my distance from them had become obvious, and one of them eventually asked why I was behaving differently. I finally told them what I had been feeling.
Their response was that I should have communicated all of this earlier because how were they supposed to know what I was feeling?
And honestly, that part is fair.
I know I have a tendency to avoid confrontation. I keep things inside, withdraw when I'm hurt, and expect people who know me well to understand that something is wrong without me explicitly saying it. My colleagues are also aware that this is how I am.
I tried to go back to being normal with them after that conversation, but something had already changed. Now we basically have a "hi-bye" relationship.
And this is where I'm struggling.
It feels like this pattern keeps repeating throughout my life. I feel lonely, neglected or excluded, I withdraw because I'm hurt, and eventually the entire situation gets reduced to the fact that I didn't communicate properly. The original loneliness or hurt somehow disappears, and I end up feeling like I'm the villain.
I don't know how much of this is my fault anymore.
I can acknowledge that I have communication issues. I avoid confrontation. I bottle things up. Sometimes I distance myself instead of telling people directly that they've hurt me. I understand that people cannot always know what I'm thinking.
But at the same time, I don't think my feelings came from nowhere either.
I've experienced being left out, not being checked on during some of the hardest moments of my life, and feeling like I cared about friendships much more deeply than the other people involved.
So I genuinely want an honest opinion.
Am I the problem?
Is there something fundamentally wrong with the way I form friendships? Am I expecting too much from people? Do I become too emotionally attached and then feel betrayed when people don't reciprocate at the same level?
Or have I simply had a series of friendships where I wasn't with the right people?
I'm not looking for someone to blindly tell me that I'm right and everyone else is wrong. I genuinely want to understand my own role in this pattern because I'm tired of wondering whether the reason I don't have friends is simply because of me.