I let a break up from a 3 day relationship ruin my life
Hey guys, so I was planning on writing a vent post. As you can probably see it ballooned to a completely outrageous length. I did not want to make this too long but I worried if I didn’t it would not present the story properly and make it seem really embarrassing from my perspective. In the end I have only embarrassed myself even more by writing over 3000(!) words to TSR but writing this in the first place and getting my thoughts down somewhere was always meant to be 50% of why I did this in the first place. I really don’t expect anyone to read all of this but if any does and can offer any advice, opinions, sympathy or anything else you are an amazing person and I really appreciate you. Anyway, here is the story…
I'm currently just coming to the end of my first year at uni and it has not been the most positive of experiences. Social issues have kind of ruined my uni experience and left me in a really unhappy state as I'm about to explain.
When I first arrived at uni at the start of freshers' week and for a couple of days I had a really hard time. I felt too shy to talk people, I had no idea how to make friends, I was scared to go out of my room or go and sit in the dining hall (I am in catered accommodation) and just all around in a really bad state mentally. In fact it actually prompted me to make a post on TSR not dissimilar to this one, except a little less negative with a bit of understanding that maybe I was irrationally catastrophising 2 days into uni.
Luckily (or so it seemed at the time) my fortunes seemed to change as I made friends with one person on my course and walked into the group of people that he had been talking to in Freshers. This worked quite well and within a month I felt like I was having a really decent time. My course was decent and although sometimes I did feel a bit intimidated and like I didn't fit in at my uni, I was not really too fussed because I felt secure in this friend group. I also sometimes felt a bit concerned I was not properly in the group because they consisted mostly of people either in the same corridor or doing the same subject (I was neither) but at the same time people still made an effort with me and the fact I had basically just gotten into this random group of people and become fairly well liked had boosted my confidence a lot.
Now within this group there was this one girl I became quite friendly with. We were always pretty friendly but at first she was always very insistent on how she felt she was asexual and had never been interested in a relationship with other people so I never really even considered the idea of being in a relationship with her. However, that changed as we became closer to each other because of similar interests and tastes in social events and just time in general. She fairly quickly stopped talking about any feelings of asexuality and it was obvious that we were interested in each other. Eventually one evening we agreed to be in a relationship.
This relationship turned out to be comically brief. It was very intense - we had only been 'dating' for a matter of hours but we would already talk to each other as if we were incredibly emotionally invested in each other and committed to a long term relationship. It was a weird byproduct of the fact we had already known each other for a while and living in the same building and in future I'll definitely be careful to take relationships more slowly, but at the same time it was something which both of us were very keen on...
...for about 3 days. A day after that we still talked to each other but she seemed a bit more reluctant and distant and for the next few days she seemed to spend the next few days strategically avoiding me. Eventually she ran out of excuses and pulled me aside and admitted that she had changed her mind about the relationship. She was very nice about it at the time - she was insistent that I had done nothing wrong, said that she just felt like she wasn't ready and maybe was asexual after all and she said she was still very keen on staying friendly with me. She even ended the conversation by saying "see you tomorrow" which is pretty hilarious in hindsight. During the conversation I was pretty upset, I didn't say anything rude or critical but I didn't exactly accept it happily or respond with much excitement at the idea of remaining friends. However, I really don't think it was that unreasonable considering I had been unceremoniously dumped basically out of nowhere.
Overnight, we both seemed to change our minds. After a few hours of sleep I had calmed down and although I was upset at it ending, I realised (as most of you would agree) that it was not the end of the world, I still had a nice group of friends, there would be plenty more opportunities for relationships, and all of the other usual post breakup cliches. She on the other hand decided immediately that she never wanted to have to acknowledge my existence ever again, tried her best to stay away from me and avoid talking to me. I will never really know why, she completely refused to talk to me or give me any reason why she was avoiding me and never made any opportunity to get even onto amiable terms again.
This instantly made things quite difficult because we were part of the same group of friends. At first I still tried my best to keep on eating with, talking to and generally interacting with the group and most people were oblivious to the situation and still very nice to me. The problem is that this girl was far more popular than me within this group. Whereas she lived on the same corridor and/or did the same subject as most in the group, I relied entirely on popularity and goodwill to know when everyone was eating and what everyone was doing on any occassion. This group had already become very good at organising things behind people's backs after they had met some people at freshers' they did not particularly like and this girl was able to get them to do the same with me. I talked to some of the people in the group who did know what was going on and they were (almost) all incredibly belittling and unsympathetic, saying that I should just move on, should not be upset and that it is not difficult at all trying to remain a member of a group of friends in which the leader of said group is trying to actively ignore you.
Unsurprisingly, I found it more and more difficult to carry on doing things with this group and kind of ended up removing myself from the group before they decided to actively tell me to go away. I started getting pretty upset as I was left completely isolated at university, started skipping meals because I didn't want to eat alone in the dining hall and was pretty scared of going out or walking around campus and my accommodation in general because I really didn't want to bump into any of these people and have an unpleasant or awkward interaction with them. However, I hoped that things would get better, maybe I could get over the fact I felt really awful and I also hoped things would clear up a little with this group and we would get on better terms.
By the end of term I was feeling more optimistic and I tried to make my way back into this group and talk to them and do things with them. Most people (the girl and some of her closest friends being the obvious exceptions) were friendly to me but also a bit awkward and were very clearly trying to avoid discussing group plans with me or basically anything which made me more than a fringe person who would occasionally sit with this group at dinner. I knew the group all had some plans to meet up over the winter break which I had originally been part of. So just after we left I messaged the guy in the group who I had generally considered my best friend at uni what the arrangements were. He responded by blanking me for 3 days before telling me that I could not come and no-one wanted me there.
Obvious this made me really depressed. I did go back to uni for a week after the break but then was advised to come home by my parents (who did know fully about the situation) and GP who were concerned about my safety. Being at home was little respite from my time at uni - my family are amazing but I have never had friends at home and my room at uni is much nicer than my home (and the food was better as well when I was not too scared to go and eat it). My family went to huge efforts to support me - I have already had counselling for many years but I also saw a psychiatrist, got put on antidepressants and spoke to pretty much every support network available at the university.
I will say all of these things were largely very pleasant and tried their best to be helpful. I did get rather frustrated because I wanted to just go back to uni and try to get on with things but everyone insisted I stayed at home and that it would be unsafe for me to go anywhere else, which was pretty difficult to argue with because it was true. The problem is however much adults try to be nice to me and offer me support, that can only do so much at dealing with the problems I am facing. And when I am having problems with peers of a similar age to me, really the thing I needed the most was the support and sympathy of other university students and people my age. This feeling is not at all unique to me and the university is supposed to have a solution to this:
Introducing the student welfare groups. At my university in each area of accommodation there is a group of students who volunteer to provide help to students in need. When I first joined the uni I volunteered to be part of this group because I wanted to be able to help people in difficulty and also just generally get involved in uni stuff as you are always advised to. When the fact I was doing this came up in conversation with the girl she thought it was a good idea and entirely off her own accord decided to join it as well. When everything turned sour this obviously made me feel like the welfare group were not really accessible and would not be sympathetic, even if that was their job. You can imagine there really are few worse feelings of isolation and lack of support among your peers when you don't feel like you can even get support from those whose job it is to be nice to you.
Remember how earlier I had said the group I was in had some experience with freezing people out before me? The welfare group were somewhat involved in that. When others in the group were getting frustrated at these 2 people they didn't like they went to speak to a member of the welfare team who pretty clearly encouraged them to unapologetically freeze these 2 people out of the group.It is a difficult situation because one of those two people really was pretty weird and creepy, but the way the member of the welfare team had said this had made this group very comfortable with toxicity and their ability to freeze anyone out of their group who they did not want to speak to any more for any reason and that doubtlessly played a part in the way I was frozen out.
Anyway, after 5 weeks at home it became pretty clear that unless I headed back to uni I would be missing too much academically. I really did not want to restart a year later (I could write another 3000 word essay on why) so despite little improvement in my mood I headed back to uni, accompanied by my entire family. Despite all the support it was pretty horrible for the most part. I was scared to leave my room out of fear of seeing people I did not want to and had little confidence to go out and really do anything. I barely ate and was hungry all the time because I didn't want to go near the dining hall. I had to wake up at 5am on Sunday to do my laundry before anyone was awake. There were occasional positives - I like my course and am quite good at it although still struggle to keep up when I become so depressed that I am unable to put my mind to work. And normally any moment of positivity would be ruined when I inevitably would walk past one of the people in the group of friends I used to have and be completely blanked and reminded of how hard of a time I have had.
Eventually in the last week of term before going home I was able to move to different accommodation in a slightly different part of the university. I was only there for a day before going home but I hope it improves things a little. It gives me a fresh start and some of the people seem nice, and I'll be a bit less scared to walk around the place or go into the dining hall there and maybe I'll feel confident enough to try and involve myself in things.
Now since at this point I felt a bit stronger and I could put my experience behind me a bit, I thought it would be a good idea to try and have a chat with the person in charge of the welfare team (a student but in an older year) at my old accommodation and just express some concerns and vent a bit. After all, the welfare teams are never very powerful or effective so it does seem like an absolute bare minimum that they should not be assisting in making people feel worse, let alone drive them right to the edge. I was expecting that if I told my story (or at least the gist of it) then she would at least seem a bit sympathetic and concerned about what had happened. That didn’t happen at all. During the chat she was very clearly trying quite hard to pretend to be sympathetic but at the same time it looked like she was trying to hold off a smirk every time I described just how much I had been hurt. I can’t believe that I did not realise in hindsight that she was probably already fully aware of this story (considering my absence from any welfare team meetings etc.) but spun in some untrue way to try and make the situation seem less unfair on me. This really was the ultimate humiliation for me and took a large chunk out of the step forward I thought I had made by moving. I had just completely exposed myself to a stranger expecting sympathy and received practically the opposite instead, even though it is their job to be sympathetic.
And that is about where I am today. I am half way through Easter break and I think the staleness of being at home right now and inability to really make progress is unhelpfully giving me more time to dwell on the past 6 months and how bad I feel. One of the most common things I am repeatedly told by family and my psychologist (and most readers are probably thinking) is that I am better off not being friends with these people and surely the entire group will tear itself apart out of toxicity. This just isn’t true though - everyone else in the group still appears to be close friends and they are generally fairly popular and well liked at the university. Meanwhile I am the person who’s uni experience has been made completely unbearable. The way I have been treated is in the eyes of most people not particularly unfair, and most people (including I) would view me as very weak for letting this entire situation ruin my life. Also, I know I *really* should not dwell on this or think about this but I can’t help but be pretty upset to hear that the girl I was with got into a different relationship a matter of weeks after dumping me. At first I was able to comfort myself with the thought that the relationship breaking down had nothing to do with me and was more just a case of the girl not wanting to be in a relationship but that is now pretty difficult to justify.
Meanwhile at home my family are absolutely spoiling me and it is hard to complain but sometimes it just feels counterproductive. For example I am being taken on a really amazing holiday in a few days. I should be absolutely delighted and excited but instead I kind of just feel guilty like I don’t deserve to have all of this put on my plate for free and that I will be wasting an amazing opportunity by being depressed half the time. The same goes for the weather - it is becoming sunnier and warmer but that is just making me feel more anxious and depressed about the fact I don’t really do much with my life and I won’t be able to hide outside in 3 layers and 2 hoods for much longer.
Overall the entire situation has made me feel terrible. And it compounds because I then feel terrible about the fact I have let this make me feel so bad in the first place. I think the absolute worst thing is that I feel completely devoid of any sympathy in my situation or like there has been any kind of injustice. I really think most people would see what happened to me as more of a dispute than targeted unpleasantness and I basically agree. And I just feel like I can’t keep on dealing with this situation over and over again. I lost most of my time as a teenager to a combination of shyness, depression, work stress and covid. Now I have lost my experience as a fresher to a drama that would look immature among year 8s, let alone 1st years at uni. My will to live can’t endure many more years of social isolation and general mediocrity and unhappiness in life. I have been born into the most incredibly privileged and loving background yet many people in far harder situations are far happier and more put together than I am. It is becoming tiring to repeatedly be told ‘not everyone enjoys their time at secondary school', ‘not everyone enjoys their time in sixth form’, ‘not everyone enjoys their first year at uni’ again and again. Being told as a teenager that maybe I’ll be happy when I’m 50 is understandably of little comfort yet it is what people repeatedly tell me, even when I try to tell them to stop.
I really can’t believe how long this has become. I knew it would probably end up being pretty long but I never thought I would be writing a significant proportion of some people’s dissertations. I could probably include thousands of words more detail in this if I wanted to, but I don't think I have left anything really major out. I promise you I am not conveniently excluding some very important detail in this story - I really never did anything wrong. I was never unpleasant to anyone, I never bullied or harrassed anyone or anything of the type and no one has accused me of anything like that because it would be completely untrue. If you have actually read all of this you are an amazing person, thank you so much. Even if no-one does I still think writing this was helpful. It's good to get some thoughts out of my head.
I'm currently just coming to the end of my first year at uni and it has not been the most positive of experiences. Social issues have kind of ruined my uni experience and left me in a really unhappy state as I'm about to explain.
When I first arrived at uni at the start of freshers' week and for a couple of days I had a really hard time. I felt too shy to talk people, I had no idea how to make friends, I was scared to go out of my room or go and sit in the dining hall (I am in catered accommodation) and just all around in a really bad state mentally. In fact it actually prompted me to make a post on TSR not dissimilar to this one, except a little less negative with a bit of understanding that maybe I was irrationally catastrophising 2 days into uni.
Luckily (or so it seemed at the time) my fortunes seemed to change as I made friends with one person on my course and walked into the group of people that he had been talking to in Freshers. This worked quite well and within a month I felt like I was having a really decent time. My course was decent and although sometimes I did feel a bit intimidated and like I didn't fit in at my uni, I was not really too fussed because I felt secure in this friend group. I also sometimes felt a bit concerned I was not properly in the group because they consisted mostly of people either in the same corridor or doing the same subject (I was neither) but at the same time people still made an effort with me and the fact I had basically just gotten into this random group of people and become fairly well liked had boosted my confidence a lot.
Now within this group there was this one girl I became quite friendly with. We were always pretty friendly but at first she was always very insistent on how she felt she was asexual and had never been interested in a relationship with other people so I never really even considered the idea of being in a relationship with her. However, that changed as we became closer to each other because of similar interests and tastes in social events and just time in general. She fairly quickly stopped talking about any feelings of asexuality and it was obvious that we were interested in each other. Eventually one evening we agreed to be in a relationship.
This relationship turned out to be comically brief. It was very intense - we had only been 'dating' for a matter of hours but we would already talk to each other as if we were incredibly emotionally invested in each other and committed to a long term relationship. It was a weird byproduct of the fact we had already known each other for a while and living in the same building and in future I'll definitely be careful to take relationships more slowly, but at the same time it was something which both of us were very keen on...
...for about 3 days. A day after that we still talked to each other but she seemed a bit more reluctant and distant and for the next few days she seemed to spend the next few days strategically avoiding me. Eventually she ran out of excuses and pulled me aside and admitted that she had changed her mind about the relationship. She was very nice about it at the time - she was insistent that I had done nothing wrong, said that she just felt like she wasn't ready and maybe was asexual after all and she said she was still very keen on staying friendly with me. She even ended the conversation by saying "see you tomorrow" which is pretty hilarious in hindsight. During the conversation I was pretty upset, I didn't say anything rude or critical but I didn't exactly accept it happily or respond with much excitement at the idea of remaining friends. However, I really don't think it was that unreasonable considering I had been unceremoniously dumped basically out of nowhere.
Overnight, we both seemed to change our minds. After a few hours of sleep I had calmed down and although I was upset at it ending, I realised (as most of you would agree) that it was not the end of the world, I still had a nice group of friends, there would be plenty more opportunities for relationships, and all of the other usual post breakup cliches. She on the other hand decided immediately that she never wanted to have to acknowledge my existence ever again, tried her best to stay away from me and avoid talking to me. I will never really know why, she completely refused to talk to me or give me any reason why she was avoiding me and never made any opportunity to get even onto amiable terms again.
This instantly made things quite difficult because we were part of the same group of friends. At first I still tried my best to keep on eating with, talking to and generally interacting with the group and most people were oblivious to the situation and still very nice to me. The problem is that this girl was far more popular than me within this group. Whereas she lived on the same corridor and/or did the same subject as most in the group, I relied entirely on popularity and goodwill to know when everyone was eating and what everyone was doing on any occassion. This group had already become very good at organising things behind people's backs after they had met some people at freshers' they did not particularly like and this girl was able to get them to do the same with me. I talked to some of the people in the group who did know what was going on and they were (almost) all incredibly belittling and unsympathetic, saying that I should just move on, should not be upset and that it is not difficult at all trying to remain a member of a group of friends in which the leader of said group is trying to actively ignore you.
Unsurprisingly, I found it more and more difficult to carry on doing things with this group and kind of ended up removing myself from the group before they decided to actively tell me to go away. I started getting pretty upset as I was left completely isolated at university, started skipping meals because I didn't want to eat alone in the dining hall and was pretty scared of going out or walking around campus and my accommodation in general because I really didn't want to bump into any of these people and have an unpleasant or awkward interaction with them. However, I hoped that things would get better, maybe I could get over the fact I felt really awful and I also hoped things would clear up a little with this group and we would get on better terms.
By the end of term I was feeling more optimistic and I tried to make my way back into this group and talk to them and do things with them. Most people (the girl and some of her closest friends being the obvious exceptions) were friendly to me but also a bit awkward and were very clearly trying to avoid discussing group plans with me or basically anything which made me more than a fringe person who would occasionally sit with this group at dinner. I knew the group all had some plans to meet up over the winter break which I had originally been part of. So just after we left I messaged the guy in the group who I had generally considered my best friend at uni what the arrangements were. He responded by blanking me for 3 days before telling me that I could not come and no-one wanted me there.
Obvious this made me really depressed. I did go back to uni for a week after the break but then was advised to come home by my parents (who did know fully about the situation) and GP who were concerned about my safety. Being at home was little respite from my time at uni - my family are amazing but I have never had friends at home and my room at uni is much nicer than my home (and the food was better as well when I was not too scared to go and eat it). My family went to huge efforts to support me - I have already had counselling for many years but I also saw a psychiatrist, got put on antidepressants and spoke to pretty much every support network available at the university.
I will say all of these things were largely very pleasant and tried their best to be helpful. I did get rather frustrated because I wanted to just go back to uni and try to get on with things but everyone insisted I stayed at home and that it would be unsafe for me to go anywhere else, which was pretty difficult to argue with because it was true. The problem is however much adults try to be nice to me and offer me support, that can only do so much at dealing with the problems I am facing. And when I am having problems with peers of a similar age to me, really the thing I needed the most was the support and sympathy of other university students and people my age. This feeling is not at all unique to me and the university is supposed to have a solution to this:
Introducing the student welfare groups. At my university in each area of accommodation there is a group of students who volunteer to provide help to students in need. When I first joined the uni I volunteered to be part of this group because I wanted to be able to help people in difficulty and also just generally get involved in uni stuff as you are always advised to. When the fact I was doing this came up in conversation with the girl she thought it was a good idea and entirely off her own accord decided to join it as well. When everything turned sour this obviously made me feel like the welfare group were not really accessible and would not be sympathetic, even if that was their job. You can imagine there really are few worse feelings of isolation and lack of support among your peers when you don't feel like you can even get support from those whose job it is to be nice to you.
Remember how earlier I had said the group I was in had some experience with freezing people out before me? The welfare group were somewhat involved in that. When others in the group were getting frustrated at these 2 people they didn't like they went to speak to a member of the welfare team who pretty clearly encouraged them to unapologetically freeze these 2 people out of the group.It is a difficult situation because one of those two people really was pretty weird and creepy, but the way the member of the welfare team had said this had made this group very comfortable with toxicity and their ability to freeze anyone out of their group who they did not want to speak to any more for any reason and that doubtlessly played a part in the way I was frozen out.
Anyway, after 5 weeks at home it became pretty clear that unless I headed back to uni I would be missing too much academically. I really did not want to restart a year later (I could write another 3000 word essay on why) so despite little improvement in my mood I headed back to uni, accompanied by my entire family. Despite all the support it was pretty horrible for the most part. I was scared to leave my room out of fear of seeing people I did not want to and had little confidence to go out and really do anything. I barely ate and was hungry all the time because I didn't want to go near the dining hall. I had to wake up at 5am on Sunday to do my laundry before anyone was awake. There were occasional positives - I like my course and am quite good at it although still struggle to keep up when I become so depressed that I am unable to put my mind to work. And normally any moment of positivity would be ruined when I inevitably would walk past one of the people in the group of friends I used to have and be completely blanked and reminded of how hard of a time I have had.
Eventually in the last week of term before going home I was able to move to different accommodation in a slightly different part of the university. I was only there for a day before going home but I hope it improves things a little. It gives me a fresh start and some of the people seem nice, and I'll be a bit less scared to walk around the place or go into the dining hall there and maybe I'll feel confident enough to try and involve myself in things.
Now since at this point I felt a bit stronger and I could put my experience behind me a bit, I thought it would be a good idea to try and have a chat with the person in charge of the welfare team (a student but in an older year) at my old accommodation and just express some concerns and vent a bit. After all, the welfare teams are never very powerful or effective so it does seem like an absolute bare minimum that they should not be assisting in making people feel worse, let alone drive them right to the edge. I was expecting that if I told my story (or at least the gist of it) then she would at least seem a bit sympathetic and concerned about what had happened. That didn’t happen at all. During the chat she was very clearly trying quite hard to pretend to be sympathetic but at the same time it looked like she was trying to hold off a smirk every time I described just how much I had been hurt. I can’t believe that I did not realise in hindsight that she was probably already fully aware of this story (considering my absence from any welfare team meetings etc.) but spun in some untrue way to try and make the situation seem less unfair on me. This really was the ultimate humiliation for me and took a large chunk out of the step forward I thought I had made by moving. I had just completely exposed myself to a stranger expecting sympathy and received practically the opposite instead, even though it is their job to be sympathetic.
And that is about where I am today. I am half way through Easter break and I think the staleness of being at home right now and inability to really make progress is unhelpfully giving me more time to dwell on the past 6 months and how bad I feel. One of the most common things I am repeatedly told by family and my psychologist (and most readers are probably thinking) is that I am better off not being friends with these people and surely the entire group will tear itself apart out of toxicity. This just isn’t true though - everyone else in the group still appears to be close friends and they are generally fairly popular and well liked at the university. Meanwhile I am the person who’s uni experience has been made completely unbearable. The way I have been treated is in the eyes of most people not particularly unfair, and most people (including I) would view me as very weak for letting this entire situation ruin my life. Also, I know I *really* should not dwell on this or think about this but I can’t help but be pretty upset to hear that the girl I was with got into a different relationship a matter of weeks after dumping me. At first I was able to comfort myself with the thought that the relationship breaking down had nothing to do with me and was more just a case of the girl not wanting to be in a relationship but that is now pretty difficult to justify.
Meanwhile at home my family are absolutely spoiling me and it is hard to complain but sometimes it just feels counterproductive. For example I am being taken on a really amazing holiday in a few days. I should be absolutely delighted and excited but instead I kind of just feel guilty like I don’t deserve to have all of this put on my plate for free and that I will be wasting an amazing opportunity by being depressed half the time. The same goes for the weather - it is becoming sunnier and warmer but that is just making me feel more anxious and depressed about the fact I don’t really do much with my life and I won’t be able to hide outside in 3 layers and 2 hoods for much longer.
Overall the entire situation has made me feel terrible. And it compounds because I then feel terrible about the fact I have let this make me feel so bad in the first place. I think the absolute worst thing is that I feel completely devoid of any sympathy in my situation or like there has been any kind of injustice. I really think most people would see what happened to me as more of a dispute than targeted unpleasantness and I basically agree. And I just feel like I can’t keep on dealing with this situation over and over again. I lost most of my time as a teenager to a combination of shyness, depression, work stress and covid. Now I have lost my experience as a fresher to a drama that would look immature among year 8s, let alone 1st years at uni. My will to live can’t endure many more years of social isolation and general mediocrity and unhappiness in life. I have been born into the most incredibly privileged and loving background yet many people in far harder situations are far happier and more put together than I am. It is becoming tiring to repeatedly be told ‘not everyone enjoys their time at secondary school', ‘not everyone enjoys their time in sixth form’, ‘not everyone enjoys their first year at uni’ again and again. Being told as a teenager that maybe I’ll be happy when I’m 50 is understandably of little comfort yet it is what people repeatedly tell me, even when I try to tell them to stop.
I really can’t believe how long this has become. I knew it would probably end up being pretty long but I never thought I would be writing a significant proportion of some people’s dissertations. I could probably include thousands of words more detail in this if I wanted to, but I don't think I have left anything really major out. I promise you I am not conveniently excluding some very important detail in this story - I really never did anything wrong. I was never unpleasant to anyone, I never bullied or harrassed anyone or anything of the type and no one has accused me of anything like that because it would be completely untrue. If you have actually read all of this you are an amazing person, thank you so much. Even if no-one does I still think writing this was helpful. It's good to get some thoughts out of my head.
Ita 2am and I read all of your post. Wasn't too long, interesting read though.
So you've been excluded, frozen out etc., it's happened to most of us, including myself. You need to be comfortable being by yourself otherwise the loneliness will drive you mad.
Your perspective on friendships etc is based on being around people your own age. Sometimes that isn't necessarily a good thing. After uni and when you enter the world of work, you'll meet people of all ages and backgrounds. I'm 33 years old and I had similar experiences like you described of being excluded and lonely before I finished uni. First I learnt to be comfortable being by myself. Because of that, after leaving uni I now have friends who are younger and older than me.
Focus on your studies, you've got plenty of time ahead of you to make friends. Not everyone has a positive experience at uni. It's just the way life is.
So you've been excluded, frozen out etc., it's happened to most of us, including myself. You need to be comfortable being by yourself otherwise the loneliness will drive you mad.
Your perspective on friendships etc is based on being around people your own age. Sometimes that isn't necessarily a good thing. After uni and when you enter the world of work, you'll meet people of all ages and backgrounds. I'm 33 years old and I had similar experiences like you described of being excluded and lonely before I finished uni. First I learnt to be comfortable being by myself. Because of that, after leaving uni I now have friends who are younger and older than me.
Focus on your studies, you've got plenty of time ahead of you to make friends. Not everyone has a positive experience at uni. It's just the way life is.
Quelle surprise - the welfare unit at a university was unprofessional, gave bad advice and were pretty rubbish all round. They may have been trying their best, but their best was about what I'd expect.
The good news is that on this section of the forum you will find people that are sympathetic to your plight.
Do you understand what the root cause of alll your challenges is?
If you take a deep dive to get to the bottom of things.
The good news is that on this section of the forum you will find people that are sympathetic to your plight.
Do you understand what the root cause of alll your challenges is?
If you take a deep dive to get to the bottom of things.
Spoiler
Hey, I read your other post from a few months back and this one too - I dont really know what to say, I just hope things get better for you! xxx
Sorry this isnt very helpful. (I tried to find the TSR emoji with 2 emojis hugging, but the only one I found was 2 emojis viciously snogging, which i didnt think you'd appreciate)
If I have an argument with friends, or am finding things awkward, I tend to blow things out of proportion and avoid them for ages, when in reality the situation was built up to be much worse than it was in my head. I sometimes think that rather than ignore them I shoud just be overly confident and force myself to be around them and act like nothing has happened, even if inside its hurting.
Sorry this isnt very helpful. (I tried to find the TSR emoji with 2 emojis hugging, but the only one I found was 2 emojis viciously snogging, which i didnt think you'd appreciate)
If I have an argument with friends, or am finding things awkward, I tend to blow things out of proportion and avoid them for ages, when in reality the situation was built up to be much worse than it was in my head. I sometimes think that rather than ignore them I shoud just be overly confident and force myself to be around them and act like nothing has happened, even if inside its hurting.
Original post by Anonymous
Hey guys, so I was planning on writing a vent post. As you can probably see it ballooned to a completely outrageous length. I did not want to make this too long but I worried if I didn’t it would not present the story properly and make it seem really embarrassing from my perspective. In the end I have only embarrassed myself even more by writing over 3000(!) words to TSR but writing this in the first place and getting my thoughts down somewhere was always meant to be 50% of why I did this in the first place. I really don’t expect anyone to read all of this but if any does and can offer any advice, opinions, sympathy or anything else you are an amazing person and I really appreciate you. Anyway, here is the story…
I'm currently just coming to the end of my first year at uni and it has not been the most positive of experiences. Social issues have kind of ruined my uni experience and left me in a really unhappy state as I'm about to explain.
When I first arrived at uni at the start of freshers' week and for a couple of days I had a really hard time. I felt too shy to talk people, I had no idea how to make friends, I was scared to go out of my room or go and sit in the dining hall (I am in catered accommodation) and just all around in a really bad state mentally. In fact it actually prompted me to make a post on TSR not dissimilar to this one, except a little less negative with a bit of understanding that maybe I was irrationally catastrophising 2 days into uni.
Luckily (or so it seemed at the time) my fortunes seemed to change as I made friends with one person on my course and walked into the group of people that he had been talking to in Freshers. This worked quite well and within a month I felt like I was having a really decent time. My course was decent and although sometimes I did feel a bit intimidated and like I didn't fit in at my uni, I was not really too fussed because I felt secure in this friend group. I also sometimes felt a bit concerned I was not properly in the group because they consisted mostly of people either in the same corridor or doing the same subject (I was neither) but at the same time people still made an effort with me and the fact I had basically just gotten into this random group of people and become fairly well liked had boosted my confidence a lot.
Now within this group there was this one girl I became quite friendly with. We were always pretty friendly but at first she was always very insistent on how she felt she was asexual and had never been interested in a relationship with other people so I never really even considered the idea of being in a relationship with her. However, that changed as we became closer to each other because of similar interests and tastes in social events and just time in general. She fairly quickly stopped talking about any feelings of asexuality and it was obvious that we were interested in each other. Eventually one evening we agreed to be in a relationship.
This relationship turned out to be comically brief. It was very intense - we had only been 'dating' for a matter of hours but we would already talk to each other as if we were incredibly emotionally invested in each other and committed to a long term relationship. It was a weird byproduct of the fact we had already known each other for a while and living in the same building and in future I'll definitely be careful to take relationships more slowly, but at the same time it was something which both of us were very keen on...
...for about 3 days. A day after that we still talked to each other but she seemed a bit more reluctant and distant and for the next few days she seemed to spend the next few days strategically avoiding me. Eventually she ran out of excuses and pulled me aside and admitted that she had changed her mind about the relationship. She was very nice about it at the time - she was insistent that I had done nothing wrong, said that she just felt like she wasn't ready and maybe was asexual after all and she said she was still very keen on staying friendly with me. She even ended the conversation by saying "see you tomorrow" which is pretty hilarious in hindsight. During the conversation I was pretty upset, I didn't say anything rude or critical but I didn't exactly accept it happily or respond with much excitement at the idea of remaining friends. However, I really don't think it was that unreasonable considering I had been unceremoniously dumped basically out of nowhere.
Overnight, we both seemed to change our minds. After a few hours of sleep I had calmed down and although I was upset at it ending, I realised (as most of you would agree) that it was not the end of the world, I still had a nice group of friends, there would be plenty more opportunities for relationships, and all of the other usual post breakup cliches. She on the other hand decided immediately that she never wanted to have to acknowledge my existence ever again, tried her best to stay away from me and avoid talking to me. I will never really know why, she completely refused to talk to me or give me any reason why she was avoiding me and never made any opportunity to get even onto amiable terms again.
This instantly made things quite difficult because we were part of the same group of friends. At first I still tried my best to keep on eating with, talking to and generally interacting with the group and most people were oblivious to the situation and still very nice to me. The problem is that this girl was far more popular than me within this group. Whereas she lived on the same corridor and/or did the same subject as most in the group, I relied entirely on popularity and goodwill to know when everyone was eating and what everyone was doing on any occassion. This group had already become very good at organising things behind people's backs after they had met some people at freshers' they did not particularly like and this girl was able to get them to do the same with me. I talked to some of the people in the group who did know what was going on and they were (almost) all incredibly belittling and unsympathetic, saying that I should just move on, should not be upset and that it is not difficult at all trying to remain a member of a group of friends in which the leader of said group is trying to actively ignore you.
Unsurprisingly, I found it more and more difficult to carry on doing things with this group and kind of ended up removing myself from the group before they decided to actively tell me to go away. I started getting pretty upset as I was left completely isolated at university, started skipping meals because I didn't want to eat alone in the dining hall and was pretty scared of going out or walking around campus and my accommodation in general because I really didn't want to bump into any of these people and have an unpleasant or awkward interaction with them. However, I hoped that things would get better, maybe I could get over the fact I felt really awful and I also hoped things would clear up a little with this group and we would get on better terms.
By the end of term I was feeling more optimistic and I tried to make my way back into this group and talk to them and do things with them. Most people (the girl and some of her closest friends being the obvious exceptions) were friendly to me but also a bit awkward and were very clearly trying to avoid discussing group plans with me or basically anything which made me more than a fringe person who would occasionally sit with this group at dinner. I knew the group all had some plans to meet up over the winter break which I had originally been part of. So just after we left I messaged the guy in the group who I had generally considered my best friend at uni what the arrangements were. He responded by blanking me for 3 days before telling me that I could not come and no-one wanted me there.
Obvious this made me really depressed. I did go back to uni for a week after the break but then was advised to come home by my parents (who did know fully about the situation) and GP who were concerned about my safety. Being at home was little respite from my time at uni - my family are amazing but I have never had friends at home and my room at uni is much nicer than my home (and the food was better as well when I was not too scared to go and eat it). My family went to huge efforts to support me - I have already had counselling for many years but I also saw a psychiatrist, got put on antidepressants and spoke to pretty much every support network available at the university.
I will say all of these things were largely very pleasant and tried their best to be helpful. I did get rather frustrated because I wanted to just go back to uni and try to get on with things but everyone insisted I stayed at home and that it would be unsafe for me to go anywhere else, which was pretty difficult to argue with because it was true. The problem is however much adults try to be nice to me and offer me support, that can only do so much at dealing with the problems I am facing. And when I am having problems with peers of a similar age to me, really the thing I needed the most was the support and sympathy of other university students and people my age. This feeling is not at all unique to me and the university is supposed to have a solution to this:
Introducing the student welfare groups. At my university in each area of accommodation there is a group of students who volunteer to provide help to students in need. When I first joined the uni I volunteered to be part of this group because I wanted to be able to help people in difficulty and also just generally get involved in uni stuff as you are always advised to. When the fact I was doing this came up in conversation with the girl she thought it was a good idea and entirely off her own accord decided to join it as well. When everything turned sour this obviously made me feel like the welfare group were not really accessible and would not be sympathetic, even if that was their job. You can imagine there really are few worse feelings of isolation and lack of support among your peers when you don't feel like you can even get support from those whose job it is to be nice to you.
Remember how earlier I had said the group I was in had some experience with freezing people out before me? The welfare group were somewhat involved in that. When others in the group were getting frustrated at these 2 people they didn't like they went to speak to a member of the welfare team who pretty clearly encouraged them to unapologetically freeze these 2 people out of the group.It is a difficult situation because one of those two people really was pretty weird and creepy, but the way the member of the welfare team had said this had made this group very comfortable with toxicity and their ability to freeze anyone out of their group who they did not want to speak to any more for any reason and that doubtlessly played a part in the way I was frozen out.
Anyway, after 5 weeks at home it became pretty clear that unless I headed back to uni I would be missing too much academically. I really did not want to restart a year later (I could write another 3000 word essay on why) so despite little improvement in my mood I headed back to uni, accompanied by my entire family. Despite all the support it was pretty horrible for the most part. I was scared to leave my room out of fear of seeing people I did not want to and had little confidence to go out and really do anything. I barely ate and was hungry all the time because I didn't want to go near the dining hall. I had to wake up at 5am on Sunday to do my laundry before anyone was awake. There were occasional positives - I like my course and am quite good at it although still struggle to keep up when I become so depressed that I am unable to put my mind to work. And normally any moment of positivity would be ruined when I inevitably would walk past one of the people in the group of friends I used to have and be completely blanked and reminded of how hard of a time I have had.
Eventually in the last week of term before going home I was able to move to different accommodation in a slightly different part of the university. I was only there for a day before going home but I hope it improves things a little. It gives me a fresh start and some of the people seem nice, and I'll be a bit less scared to walk around the place or go into the dining hall there and maybe I'll feel confident enough to try and involve myself in things.
Now since at this point I felt a bit stronger and I could put my experience behind me a bit, I thought it would be a good idea to try and have a chat with the person in charge of the welfare team (a student but in an older year) at my old accommodation and just express some concerns and vent a bit. After all, the welfare teams are never very powerful or effective so it does seem like an absolute bare minimum that they should not be assisting in making people feel worse, let alone drive them right to the edge. I was expecting that if I told my story (or at least the gist of it) then she would at least seem a bit sympathetic and concerned about what had happened. That didn’t happen at all. During the chat she was very clearly trying quite hard to pretend to be sympathetic but at the same time it looked like she was trying to hold off a smirk every time I described just how much I had been hurt. I can’t believe that I did not realise in hindsight that she was probably already fully aware of this story (considering my absence from any welfare team meetings etc.) but spun in some untrue way to try and make the situation seem less unfair on me. This really was the ultimate humiliation for me and took a large chunk out of the step forward I thought I had made by moving. I had just completely exposed myself to a stranger expecting sympathy and received practically the opposite instead, even though it is their job to be sympathetic.
And that is about where I am today. I am half way through Easter break and I think the staleness of being at home right now and inability to really make progress is unhelpfully giving me more time to dwell on the past 6 months and how bad I feel. One of the most common things I am repeatedly told by family and my psychologist (and most readers are probably thinking) is that I am better off not being friends with these people and surely the entire group will tear itself apart out of toxicity. This just isn’t true though - everyone else in the group still appears to be close friends and they are generally fairly popular and well liked at the university. Meanwhile I am the person who’s uni experience has been made completely unbearable. The way I have been treated is in the eyes of most people not particularly unfair, and most people (including I) would view me as very weak for letting this entire situation ruin my life. Also, I know I *really* should not dwell on this or think about this but I can’t help but be pretty upset to hear that the girl I was with got into a different relationship a matter of weeks after dumping me. At first I was able to comfort myself with the thought that the relationship breaking down had nothing to do with me and was more just a case of the girl not wanting to be in a relationship but that is now pretty difficult to justify.
Meanwhile at home my family are absolutely spoiling me and it is hard to complain but sometimes it just feels counterproductive. For example I am being taken on a really amazing holiday in a few days. I should be absolutely delighted and excited but instead I kind of just feel guilty like I don’t deserve to have all of this put on my plate for free and that I will be wasting an amazing opportunity by being depressed half the time. The same goes for the weather - it is becoming sunnier and warmer but that is just making me feel more anxious and depressed about the fact I don’t really do much with my life and I won’t be able to hide outside in 3 layers and 2 hoods for much longer.
Overall the entire situation has made me feel terrible. And it compounds because I then feel terrible about the fact I have let this make me feel so bad in the first place. I think the absolute worst thing is that I feel completely devoid of any sympathy in my situation or like there has been any kind of injustice. I really think most people would see what happened to me as more of a dispute than targeted unpleasantness and I basically agree. And I just feel like I can’t keep on dealing with this situation over and over again. I lost most of my time as a teenager to a combination of shyness, depression, work stress and covid. Now I have lost my experience as a fresher to a drama that would look immature among year 8s, let alone 1st years at uni. My will to live can’t endure many more years of social isolation and general mediocrity and unhappiness in life. I have been born into the most incredibly privileged and loving background yet many people in far harder situations are far happier and more put together than I am. It is becoming tiring to repeatedly be told ‘not everyone enjoys their time at secondary school', ‘not everyone enjoys their time in sixth form’, ‘not everyone enjoys their first year at uni’ again and again. Being told as a teenager that maybe I’ll be happy when I’m 50 is understandably of little comfort yet it is what people repeatedly tell me, even when I try to tell them to stop.
I really can’t believe how long this has become. I knew it would probably end up being pretty long but I never thought I would be writing a significant proportion of some people’s dissertations. I could probably include thousands of words more detail in this if I wanted to, but I don't think I have left anything really major out. I promise you I am not conveniently excluding some very important detail in this story - I really never did anything wrong. I was never unpleasant to anyone, I never bullied or harrassed anyone or anything of the type and no one has accused me of anything like that because it would be completely untrue. If you have actually read all of this you are an amazing person, thank you so much. Even if no-one does I still think writing this was helpful. It's good to get some thoughts out of my head.
I'm currently just coming to the end of my first year at uni and it has not been the most positive of experiences. Social issues have kind of ruined my uni experience and left me in a really unhappy state as I'm about to explain.
When I first arrived at uni at the start of freshers' week and for a couple of days I had a really hard time. I felt too shy to talk people, I had no idea how to make friends, I was scared to go out of my room or go and sit in the dining hall (I am in catered accommodation) and just all around in a really bad state mentally. In fact it actually prompted me to make a post on TSR not dissimilar to this one, except a little less negative with a bit of understanding that maybe I was irrationally catastrophising 2 days into uni.
Luckily (or so it seemed at the time) my fortunes seemed to change as I made friends with one person on my course and walked into the group of people that he had been talking to in Freshers. This worked quite well and within a month I felt like I was having a really decent time. My course was decent and although sometimes I did feel a bit intimidated and like I didn't fit in at my uni, I was not really too fussed because I felt secure in this friend group. I also sometimes felt a bit concerned I was not properly in the group because they consisted mostly of people either in the same corridor or doing the same subject (I was neither) but at the same time people still made an effort with me and the fact I had basically just gotten into this random group of people and become fairly well liked had boosted my confidence a lot.
Now within this group there was this one girl I became quite friendly with. We were always pretty friendly but at first she was always very insistent on how she felt she was asexual and had never been interested in a relationship with other people so I never really even considered the idea of being in a relationship with her. However, that changed as we became closer to each other because of similar interests and tastes in social events and just time in general. She fairly quickly stopped talking about any feelings of asexuality and it was obvious that we were interested in each other. Eventually one evening we agreed to be in a relationship.
This relationship turned out to be comically brief. It was very intense - we had only been 'dating' for a matter of hours but we would already talk to each other as if we were incredibly emotionally invested in each other and committed to a long term relationship. It was a weird byproduct of the fact we had already known each other for a while and living in the same building and in future I'll definitely be careful to take relationships more slowly, but at the same time it was something which both of us were very keen on...
...for about 3 days. A day after that we still talked to each other but she seemed a bit more reluctant and distant and for the next few days she seemed to spend the next few days strategically avoiding me. Eventually she ran out of excuses and pulled me aside and admitted that she had changed her mind about the relationship. She was very nice about it at the time - she was insistent that I had done nothing wrong, said that she just felt like she wasn't ready and maybe was asexual after all and she said she was still very keen on staying friendly with me. She even ended the conversation by saying "see you tomorrow" which is pretty hilarious in hindsight. During the conversation I was pretty upset, I didn't say anything rude or critical but I didn't exactly accept it happily or respond with much excitement at the idea of remaining friends. However, I really don't think it was that unreasonable considering I had been unceremoniously dumped basically out of nowhere.
Overnight, we both seemed to change our minds. After a few hours of sleep I had calmed down and although I was upset at it ending, I realised (as most of you would agree) that it was not the end of the world, I still had a nice group of friends, there would be plenty more opportunities for relationships, and all of the other usual post breakup cliches. She on the other hand decided immediately that she never wanted to have to acknowledge my existence ever again, tried her best to stay away from me and avoid talking to me. I will never really know why, she completely refused to talk to me or give me any reason why she was avoiding me and never made any opportunity to get even onto amiable terms again.
This instantly made things quite difficult because we were part of the same group of friends. At first I still tried my best to keep on eating with, talking to and generally interacting with the group and most people were oblivious to the situation and still very nice to me. The problem is that this girl was far more popular than me within this group. Whereas she lived on the same corridor and/or did the same subject as most in the group, I relied entirely on popularity and goodwill to know when everyone was eating and what everyone was doing on any occassion. This group had already become very good at organising things behind people's backs after they had met some people at freshers' they did not particularly like and this girl was able to get them to do the same with me. I talked to some of the people in the group who did know what was going on and they were (almost) all incredibly belittling and unsympathetic, saying that I should just move on, should not be upset and that it is not difficult at all trying to remain a member of a group of friends in which the leader of said group is trying to actively ignore you.
Unsurprisingly, I found it more and more difficult to carry on doing things with this group and kind of ended up removing myself from the group before they decided to actively tell me to go away. I started getting pretty upset as I was left completely isolated at university, started skipping meals because I didn't want to eat alone in the dining hall and was pretty scared of going out or walking around campus and my accommodation in general because I really didn't want to bump into any of these people and have an unpleasant or awkward interaction with them. However, I hoped that things would get better, maybe I could get over the fact I felt really awful and I also hoped things would clear up a little with this group and we would get on better terms.
By the end of term I was feeling more optimistic and I tried to make my way back into this group and talk to them and do things with them. Most people (the girl and some of her closest friends being the obvious exceptions) were friendly to me but also a bit awkward and were very clearly trying to avoid discussing group plans with me or basically anything which made me more than a fringe person who would occasionally sit with this group at dinner. I knew the group all had some plans to meet up over the winter break which I had originally been part of. So just after we left I messaged the guy in the group who I had generally considered my best friend at uni what the arrangements were. He responded by blanking me for 3 days before telling me that I could not come and no-one wanted me there.
Obvious this made me really depressed. I did go back to uni for a week after the break but then was advised to come home by my parents (who did know fully about the situation) and GP who were concerned about my safety. Being at home was little respite from my time at uni - my family are amazing but I have never had friends at home and my room at uni is much nicer than my home (and the food was better as well when I was not too scared to go and eat it). My family went to huge efforts to support me - I have already had counselling for many years but I also saw a psychiatrist, got put on antidepressants and spoke to pretty much every support network available at the university.
I will say all of these things were largely very pleasant and tried their best to be helpful. I did get rather frustrated because I wanted to just go back to uni and try to get on with things but everyone insisted I stayed at home and that it would be unsafe for me to go anywhere else, which was pretty difficult to argue with because it was true. The problem is however much adults try to be nice to me and offer me support, that can only do so much at dealing with the problems I am facing. And when I am having problems with peers of a similar age to me, really the thing I needed the most was the support and sympathy of other university students and people my age. This feeling is not at all unique to me and the university is supposed to have a solution to this:
Introducing the student welfare groups. At my university in each area of accommodation there is a group of students who volunteer to provide help to students in need. When I first joined the uni I volunteered to be part of this group because I wanted to be able to help people in difficulty and also just generally get involved in uni stuff as you are always advised to. When the fact I was doing this came up in conversation with the girl she thought it was a good idea and entirely off her own accord decided to join it as well. When everything turned sour this obviously made me feel like the welfare group were not really accessible and would not be sympathetic, even if that was their job. You can imagine there really are few worse feelings of isolation and lack of support among your peers when you don't feel like you can even get support from those whose job it is to be nice to you.
Remember how earlier I had said the group I was in had some experience with freezing people out before me? The welfare group were somewhat involved in that. When others in the group were getting frustrated at these 2 people they didn't like they went to speak to a member of the welfare team who pretty clearly encouraged them to unapologetically freeze these 2 people out of the group.It is a difficult situation because one of those two people really was pretty weird and creepy, but the way the member of the welfare team had said this had made this group very comfortable with toxicity and their ability to freeze anyone out of their group who they did not want to speak to any more for any reason and that doubtlessly played a part in the way I was frozen out.
Anyway, after 5 weeks at home it became pretty clear that unless I headed back to uni I would be missing too much academically. I really did not want to restart a year later (I could write another 3000 word essay on why) so despite little improvement in my mood I headed back to uni, accompanied by my entire family. Despite all the support it was pretty horrible for the most part. I was scared to leave my room out of fear of seeing people I did not want to and had little confidence to go out and really do anything. I barely ate and was hungry all the time because I didn't want to go near the dining hall. I had to wake up at 5am on Sunday to do my laundry before anyone was awake. There were occasional positives - I like my course and am quite good at it although still struggle to keep up when I become so depressed that I am unable to put my mind to work. And normally any moment of positivity would be ruined when I inevitably would walk past one of the people in the group of friends I used to have and be completely blanked and reminded of how hard of a time I have had.
Eventually in the last week of term before going home I was able to move to different accommodation in a slightly different part of the university. I was only there for a day before going home but I hope it improves things a little. It gives me a fresh start and some of the people seem nice, and I'll be a bit less scared to walk around the place or go into the dining hall there and maybe I'll feel confident enough to try and involve myself in things.
Now since at this point I felt a bit stronger and I could put my experience behind me a bit, I thought it would be a good idea to try and have a chat with the person in charge of the welfare team (a student but in an older year) at my old accommodation and just express some concerns and vent a bit. After all, the welfare teams are never very powerful or effective so it does seem like an absolute bare minimum that they should not be assisting in making people feel worse, let alone drive them right to the edge. I was expecting that if I told my story (or at least the gist of it) then she would at least seem a bit sympathetic and concerned about what had happened. That didn’t happen at all. During the chat she was very clearly trying quite hard to pretend to be sympathetic but at the same time it looked like she was trying to hold off a smirk every time I described just how much I had been hurt. I can’t believe that I did not realise in hindsight that she was probably already fully aware of this story (considering my absence from any welfare team meetings etc.) but spun in some untrue way to try and make the situation seem less unfair on me. This really was the ultimate humiliation for me and took a large chunk out of the step forward I thought I had made by moving. I had just completely exposed myself to a stranger expecting sympathy and received practically the opposite instead, even though it is their job to be sympathetic.
And that is about where I am today. I am half way through Easter break and I think the staleness of being at home right now and inability to really make progress is unhelpfully giving me more time to dwell on the past 6 months and how bad I feel. One of the most common things I am repeatedly told by family and my psychologist (and most readers are probably thinking) is that I am better off not being friends with these people and surely the entire group will tear itself apart out of toxicity. This just isn’t true though - everyone else in the group still appears to be close friends and they are generally fairly popular and well liked at the university. Meanwhile I am the person who’s uni experience has been made completely unbearable. The way I have been treated is in the eyes of most people not particularly unfair, and most people (including I) would view me as very weak for letting this entire situation ruin my life. Also, I know I *really* should not dwell on this or think about this but I can’t help but be pretty upset to hear that the girl I was with got into a different relationship a matter of weeks after dumping me. At first I was able to comfort myself with the thought that the relationship breaking down had nothing to do with me and was more just a case of the girl not wanting to be in a relationship but that is now pretty difficult to justify.
Meanwhile at home my family are absolutely spoiling me and it is hard to complain but sometimes it just feels counterproductive. For example I am being taken on a really amazing holiday in a few days. I should be absolutely delighted and excited but instead I kind of just feel guilty like I don’t deserve to have all of this put on my plate for free and that I will be wasting an amazing opportunity by being depressed half the time. The same goes for the weather - it is becoming sunnier and warmer but that is just making me feel more anxious and depressed about the fact I don’t really do much with my life and I won’t be able to hide outside in 3 layers and 2 hoods for much longer.
Overall the entire situation has made me feel terrible. And it compounds because I then feel terrible about the fact I have let this make me feel so bad in the first place. I think the absolute worst thing is that I feel completely devoid of any sympathy in my situation or like there has been any kind of injustice. I really think most people would see what happened to me as more of a dispute than targeted unpleasantness and I basically agree. And I just feel like I can’t keep on dealing with this situation over and over again. I lost most of my time as a teenager to a combination of shyness, depression, work stress and covid. Now I have lost my experience as a fresher to a drama that would look immature among year 8s, let alone 1st years at uni. My will to live can’t endure many more years of social isolation and general mediocrity and unhappiness in life. I have been born into the most incredibly privileged and loving background yet many people in far harder situations are far happier and more put together than I am. It is becoming tiring to repeatedly be told ‘not everyone enjoys their time at secondary school', ‘not everyone enjoys their time in sixth form’, ‘not everyone enjoys their first year at uni’ again and again. Being told as a teenager that maybe I’ll be happy when I’m 50 is understandably of little comfort yet it is what people repeatedly tell me, even when I try to tell them to stop.
I really can’t believe how long this has become. I knew it would probably end up being pretty long but I never thought I would be writing a significant proportion of some people’s dissertations. I could probably include thousands of words more detail in this if I wanted to, but I don't think I have left anything really major out. I promise you I am not conveniently excluding some very important detail in this story - I really never did anything wrong. I was never unpleasant to anyone, I never bullied or harrassed anyone or anything of the type and no one has accused me of anything like that because it would be completely untrue. If you have actually read all of this you are an amazing person, thank you so much. Even if no-one does I still think writing this was helpful. It's good to get some thoughts out of my head.
hey this is really random but do you by any chance come from an all-girls secondary school/sixth form? just wondering bc ur story sounds RLLY similar to what one of my first-year uni friends has been going thru this year asw (like it's almost identical??) sooo if this is who i think it is then girll call me -M
if not tho, then im rlly sorry ur going thru all this and that ppl ur age are being so unsupportive
well done on moving accoms tho, that's a rlly good step to distance urself from that group and hopefully make new friends (it's never too late!!) it's also good that ur family is being rlly understanding and that ur getting the help u need w ur mental health - go on that holiday and put this girl and her group at the back of ur mind and j try ur best to enjoy urself 
Original post by spill_the_tea
hey this is really random but do you by any chance come from an all-girls secondary school/sixth form? just wondering bc ur story sounds RLLY similar to what one of my first-year uni friends has been going thru this year asw (like it's almost identical??) sooo if this is who i think it is then girll call me -M
if not tho, then im rlly sorry ur going thru all this and that ppl ur age are being so unsupportive well done on moving accoms tho, that's a rlly good step to distance urself from that group and hopefully make new friends (it's never too late!!) it's also good that ur family is being rlly understanding and that ur getting the help u need w ur mental health - go on that holiday and put this girl and her group at the back of ur mind and j try ur best to enjoy urself
if not tho, then im rlly sorry ur going thru all this and that ppl ur age are being so unsupportive
well done on moving accoms tho, that's a rlly good step to distance urself from that group and hopefully make new friends (it's never too late!!) it's also good that ur family is being rlly understanding and that ur getting the help u need w ur mental health - go on that holiday and put this girl and her group at the back of ur mind and j try ur best to enjoy urself Nah I'm a guy lol
. Find it interesting (and a bit amusing tbh) that you know someone who has been through such a similar situation though.Original post by Anonymous
Nah I'm a guy lol . Find it interesting (and a bit amusing tbh) that you know someone who has been through such a similar situation though.
. Find it interesting (and a bit amusing tbh) that you know someone who has been through such a similar situation though.oh that's so crazy then wow, after reading ur post i acc went and msgd that friend of mine asking her how she was doing and if she wanted to call 😅 but ig the fact that it's such a similar situation means ur not the only one going thru something like this, so maybe try take some comfort in that? idk but j stay away from this girl, she sounds rude af anyways and uno what they say - outta sight, outta mind 🙃
Original post by spill_the_tea
oh that's so crazy then wow, after reading ur post i acc went and msgd that friend of mine asking her how she was doing and if she wanted to call 😅 but ig the fact that it's such a similar situation means ur not the only one going thru something like this, so maybe try take some comfort in that? idk but j stay away from this girl, she sounds rude af anyways and uno what they say - outta sight, outta mind 🙃
Yeah although it sounds like at least your friend has a decent of people outside of uni. I've kinda just spent the last few years being told not to worry too much that I haven't been able to make any friends in 6th form/pandemic and I feel like with this something I've been waiting for for years has just collapsed and now I have nothing
Original post by Anonymous
Yeah although it sounds like at least your friend has a decent of people outside of uni. I've kinda just spent the last few years being told not to worry too much that I haven't been able to make any friends in 6th form/pandemic and I feel like with this something I've been waiting for for years has just collapsed and now I have nothing
honestly, i'm pretty sure im the only person outside of my friend's family who even knows abt her situation - and even then, idk every detail bc she finds it too upsetting to talk about sometimes.
when u say u haven't made any friends in sixth form, dyu mean at all or no close, meaningful friendships? surely u have one good friend u trust outside of that uni group? but even if u don't, it's still not too late to make new friends and have a fresh start at uni - don't let this one negative situation ruin ur entire uni experience. u still have a couple yrs to go and u dont want to waste this time of ur life feeling depressed and sorry for urself over a girl who u probably wont even remember, or at least care about, in 5 yrs time.
Original post by spill_the_tea
honestly, i'm pretty sure im the only person outside of my friend's family who even knows abt her situation - and even then, idk every detail bc she finds it too upsetting to talk about sometimes.
when u say u haven't made any friends in sixth form, dyu mean at all or no close, meaningful friendships? surely u have one good friend u trust outside of that uni group? but even if u don't, it's still not too late to make new friends and have a fresh start at uni - don't let this one negative situation ruin ur entire uni experience. u still have a couple yrs to go and u dont want to waste this time of ur life feeling depressed and sorry for urself over a girl who u probably wont even remember, or at least care about, in 5 yrs time.
when u say u haven't made any friends in sixth form, dyu mean at all or no close, meaningful friendships? surely u have one good friend u trust outside of that uni group? but even if u don't, it's still not too late to make new friends and have a fresh start at uni - don't let this one negative situation ruin ur entire uni experience. u still have a couple yrs to go and u dont want to waste this time of ur life feeling depressed and sorry for urself over a girl who u probably wont even remember, or at least care about, in 5 yrs time.
Yeah idk obviously I get you're trying to be helpful and I really appreciate you trying to talk to me but tbh I've heard this kind of thing a fair amount and each time I hear it it just makes me feel worse like I'm just week and useless for letting this ruin my life in the first place...
have you tried the gym?
Original post by Albyr7
have you tried the gym?
Tbh I've never really liked the gym, I used to go sometimes or go on runs but I've always found 'pure' exercise just so mind numbingly boring. And it's not as if I have some great masculine urge to become insanely strong or have huge muscles, it's just not really my personality or something I care about.
I much prefer playing sports, I play squash a fair amount, I used to play more at uni but the social anxiety of going to training and seeing some people who were unsavoury/had vague links to these people made me go less. I have always really enjoyed playing squash in the moment but it never really helps me in the grand scheme of things, when I get back from training I just go back to feeling awful and I haven't really made friends from it.
I used to go bouldering quite a bit as well but it was never really something I actually enjoyed just kinda made myself do, also for reasons you might be able to guess I have become really scared of heights recently.
you can try swimming, I've heard it helps!
Original post by Miss Paige
So long story short girl changes her mind after 3 days in the relationship, geez and I thought us girls wrote a huge story when drama happens
Yay thank you being mocked for how I feel and have been affected by something is exactly what I need, thank you so much I feel so much better now
Original post by Anonymous
Yay thank you being mocked for how I feel and have been affected by something is exactly what I need, thank you so much I feel so much better now
No problem
Original post by student1R
I have no helpful advice however I’m sending you all the support. I am feeling really anxious right now about starting placement tomorrow though and reading this has taken my mind off it. Keep us updated
Hey it's the same guy who made the original post, I deleted my tsr account out of embarrassment but eventually couldn't resist making a new one cause I'm turbulent af.
I'm flattered you were so gripped by my post, hope your placement has been going alright
.As for me things have pretty much continued to be horrible, moving accommodation during exam season was never really gonna fix my problems, if anything I just felt more anxious and isolated moving to a new place and feeling like I couldn't fit in.
At this point I'm so fed up of writing off each new year with 'it gets better'. I have wasted so many years of my life which are meant to be amazing and I'll never get them back or have anything like these opportunities again. Things might get better for me eventually but it's difficult to care, I'm going to have to grow up resenting that regardless of whether I am a happier 40 year old or not.
Original post by Anonymous
Hey it's the same guy who made the original post, I deleted my tsr account out of embarrassment but eventually couldn't resist making a new one cause I'm turbulent af.
I'm flattered you were so gripped by my post, hope your placement has been going alright.
As for me things have pretty much continued to be horrible, moving accommodation during exam season was never really gonna fix my problems, if anything I just felt more anxious and isolated moving to a new place and feeling like I couldn't fit in.
At this point I'm so fed up of writing off each new year with 'it gets better'. I have wasted so many years of my life which are meant to be amazing and I'll never get them back or have anything like these opportunities again. Things might get better for me eventually but it's difficult to care, I'm going to have to grow up resenting that regardless of whether I am a happier 40 year old or not.
I'm flattered you were so gripped by my post, hope your placement has been going alright
.As for me things have pretty much continued to be horrible, moving accommodation during exam season was never really gonna fix my problems, if anything I just felt more anxious and isolated moving to a new place and feeling like I couldn't fit in.
At this point I'm so fed up of writing off each new year with 'it gets better'. I have wasted so many years of my life which are meant to be amazing and I'll never get them back or have anything like these opportunities again. Things might get better for me eventually but it's difficult to care, I'm going to have to grow up resenting that regardless of whether I am a happier 40 year old or not.
Heyy i'm genuinely so sorry for everything that's happened, my God that sucks. Ignore those idiots who don't seem to have a sympathetic bone in their body when your situation is clearly awful. I'm starting uni this year and i came across your post and i'm just sorry that those people were so toxic. I'm not too great with advice but i can offer you support and an ear if you ever wanna vent again. I went through something a little similar once and it was brutal and tbh the only reason i got out of it was lockdown separating everyone for me. I think moving accom was the best decision for you and all i can say is do everything you can to ignore them over avoiding them. different situation but i have a little insecurity of eating in front of people so to distract myself, i put on my headphones and watch a yt video with the volume on full. idk if that's helpful at all but, what i'm trying to say is it's better for you to "avoid" them in your mind rather than in person because like you said, it stopped you from being able to eat. Anyways anyways lmk how you're doing right now. please trust that everything is temporary, including this situation. <3
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