Angst

It's a sad fact that I don't have very many friends. This has been a pattern throughout my life, to be honest, but now I'm in my mid-thirties, it seems all the more depressing.

The scene was set, I'm told, in primary school, when a rearrangement of classes between one term and the next meant that I was no longer in the same class as most of my friends... and I didn't really make many - if any - new ones. Of course, this did eventually change. By middle school, I had quite a collection of friends who I'd hang out with in school and occasionally visit outside of school. Then high school happened, and most of my old schoolfriends went elsewhere, so I made new friends during my teens.

But, of my group, I was the only one who didn't go to university. After my A-Levels, I spent a year looking for my ideal job (I've probably mentioned this at least a dozen times a year), failed because techology suddenly surged forward, far beyond what I could do, and so settled on the first job that looked interesting.

In my first job, I didn't really make friends because I was much younger than most of my colleagues. I started hanging out with one intermittently, but we fell out a few years ago, and haven't spoken since.

In my second job, I was in much the same position, only more so. Easily the youngest one there, and all of them had been a close-knit team for ages before I started. I was liked/respected because I did my job very well... but wasn't part of the 'in crowd', and so didn't hang out with anyone there. I ended up resigning after a kind of breakdown, and had been seeing a shrink for several months. It all seemed to suggest I couldn't really cope with the office environment.

About nine months later, I started my third job... in which I was neither the youngest nor the least experienced in my field... But, by this point, I was being very aloof. I started hanging out with most of my colleagues, but slowly withdrew - for no discernable reason, other than that I was just finding it 'difficult', and tended to have anxiety attacks when in large groups of colleagues. It's a noise thing - if I can't hear myself think, I start to panic, and withdraw further and further. Some of my colleagues probably found it baffling... but only rarely would they not take 'no' for an answer. I was liked, but very closed-off. I basically didn't feel like trusting and befriending anyone because of what had happened in my second job. In one respect, this turned out to be a good thing, because several of them were psychos... but it surely counted against me when a couple of them started spreading nasty rumours about me, and turning colleagues against me in a vicious little powerplay.

As the cast list changed over the years - not just in my department, throughout the entire company - and we were bought out not once but twice, I pretty much stopped hanging out with anyone from work for years. I had a couple of outside-work friends (one or two from my school days, one from my first job for my first few years in this job), so I really didn't feel the need to be spending personal time with the people I worked with. Then again, by this point, I was beginning to be older than most of my colleagues...

About halfway through my time there, I'd lost a couple of friends and made a new one, but the cast list in the office just kept on changing. It was hardly worth learning names, let alone getting to know people, as they'd be gone in a couple of days/weeks/months. By the time I was made redundant, I was a 'popular stranger' to most of my colleagues... and, while I accepted the invitation to monthly dinners with a group of them, their own life dramas are already beginning to get in the way.

Now I'm unemployed, living alone, not seeing any friends with any regularity, one of my friends is also kind of my ex, and, while I'm trying to move on via eHarmony, I'm finding it uncomfortable. I hated internet dating the first time I tried it, and this is no better, personality profiling or not. I'm spending my days mostly at home, considering all the things I could be doing, but not actually doing them.

Lately, I've started to think that the best thing I could do is throw myself into a new office job, and just be as stupidly open as I can handle, just to break the habit I've grown into of being terribly guarded. I'm half tempted to get myself down to the Job Centre, to see if I get lucky a second time, and find myself a completely different line of work...

...Which I've said before, and not acted on...