You're not wrong-- being isolated has been a huge relief, and I always planned on moving out of Indiana and living on my own for a few years after graduation. I'm still moving away and getting the isolation I want, but now my girlfriend will be with me for emotional and financial support. So the situation is arguably better than it could've been.

But my problem stems from how the isolation came about, how my friends have responded to it, and how I've responded to my friends. Currently, the only people I really hang out with are my girlfriend and my other roommate (Shirley). Shirley's easy to live around (she has social anxiety, so she understands how it can be hard to be around people), but even she has acknowledged that once we all graduate and go to our separate parts of the country, we probably won't keep the greatest contact and the friendship will die. Which is sad to hear, but also a relief on my end because I too thought it would go in that direction, knowing me.

So I've had three people already tell me they don't wanna be my friend anymore because it seems like I don't care about them, and it seems like I'll lose my other friends in Indiana before I move to Arizona. A few years ago, it felt like I had at least ten or fifteen people I was close to, and countless more I'd see at parties and other get-togethers. I felt like an incredibly social person, even though I knew I'd go off to live my own life at the end of college. I knew all those college friends probably wouldn't be in my life by then. I guess I just didn't expect to lose contact with all of them because of my own negligence. What we had was significant, and a lot of people reached out to me to stay friends, but I never responded. Because I guess I didn't want to. I've lost a lot of close friends and it feels like the loss never really hit me, so I feel kind of callous.

The thing that really gets to me is I set up these friendships for my own convenience. I liked that they were all people who would contact me first and suggest things that we could do, and I would just say, "yes," to the activity. I thought it was okay to set up my whole friend group like that. It took a long time to realize that other people want me to reach out first too, but once I learned that, it's like I didn't want to be friends with them anymore. Adding that responsibility when I had schoolwork, stuff to do in campus clubs, whatever, it just felt like too much. I didn't want to put in the work to maintain the friendships.

So now I have this isolation, but I also have an anguish that comes along with it. Nothing inside my apartment or out in the city feels like fun. It feels like I haven't had a personality this whole time and now I have to build it. I'm constantly wondering who I really am (which is also just an early-twenties thing, but still sucks). It feels like all the people who used to be my friends-- along with anyone whom I ever wanted to like me but never did-- are constantly talking about me behind my back and never saying anything good. I fear running into them in public because I would just have nothing to say to them. I literally run and dip into the closest building when I do see these people in public.

In Arizona, no one's gonna know me, so I won't need to hide, but I feel like I'll fall into the same patterns with friendships. I'm afraid of meeting new people because they might think I'm weird or too standoffish because I don't wanna get too close too fast. I worry about losing anyone I get close to and not caring in the way I feel like I should. But maybe I just don't process the loss of friendships the way most people do, and it's not something that makes me a bad person, but just a peculiar thing about my mind.