Sometimes, I wonder, so very much, which came first: my intense worries that people do not like me or the fact that they do not. And what is the relationship between social anxiety and self-fulfilling prophecy? Can we unintentionally bring about the end of a really nice and lovely friendship because of our own severe doubts that the other person has just been extremely polite the entire time?

It is so emotionally painful to constantly live in doubt and fear over how others see you and whether they truly want to be your friend or not. There are no concrete words or any way to truly capture it :(

This article below is one of the best I have seen on the topic of social anxiety and self-fulfilling prophecy:

 https://socialanxietyinstitute.org/self-fulfilling-prophecy-breaking-cycle

Well, I failed miserably in telling myself not to get "attached" to someone so the next step is show my feelings who is boss. Easier said than done, but you just have to keep trying to get them under control. Feelings, especially feelings for someone else, make everything so much more complicated and painful and it is so tempting to just want to not have any. I saw this on "Bob's Burgers" a while back and, sometimes, I actually whisper this under my breath and it seems to help.


 

A passage from a book I am reading is haunting me with its undeniable truth:

 "...It’s always seemed to me that she couldn’t stand the sight of me.”

 “Why would you think that?” 

“I believe you always know when someone doesn’t like you, even when they’re trying really hard not to show it."


...Sometimes I think confusion about why someone acts the way he or she does is its own form of heartbreak. If only people knew that outright and honest dislike hurts far less in the end than a forced politeness that comes from not wanting to hurt you :(

I just read this in a book and it rings so very, very true:

"...she couldn’t envisage inspiring such depth of emotion in anyone, and it made her feel cheated."

The character thinking this has never really been in a mutually loving relationship before and so much of what she thinks and feels is often painful and yet refreshing in a genre that can often retread over mundane or silly things and gloss over the nitty gritty of real life.

There are very few books in my reading life that have ever gotten to me like this. The Fortune Teller's Daughter by Diane Wood has made me sick inside to the point that I have thought about not finishing it more than once and yet I keep going back to it because it is one of the best things I have read in ages and lately I just cannot find myself wanting to read that much so if I do read (and really want to read) it almost feels like a miracle.

Only one other book I ever read made me feel this uncomfortable:

A review at the time went:

 “I’ve never seen anyone capture sordid human nature so clearly. I was completely drawn in, totally immersed. I felt ill much of the time.”
– Russell Kirkpatrick

 

The looks on the faces of the people here perfectly capture the childhood of the main character in The Fortune Teller's Daughter, which has a much more benign face to the cover>>>

Though Slights is a horror novel and The Fortune Teller's Daughter is a romance, both feature characters with unspeakably messed up childhoods. The difference is in how one has embraced what happened to her and taken on its sickness and evil and the other has spent her life trying to escape it and be a good person.

In both, there is a sense that loneliness does not truly hurt until you truly understand and know that you are lonely. And one way that can happen, that is so unbearably real and familiar, is 'one day' being okay with being lonely and the 'next day' having met and made friends with someone really, really special and having lost her or knowing you are going to...suddenly, the loneliness you spent so many, many years with and managed okay enough now feels like the worst kind of heartbreak...

good advice...