The last four months have been the roughest of my life. My health collapsed. My mental health collapsed. I’ve been to over 50 doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologist appointments — 30 in the first month. I’ve been poked with needles and scanned and transported via ambulance and given bottles upon bottles of pills.
It’s one of life’s greatest practical jokes that the more you need friendship, the less you are able to be a friend.
When your body tells you that you are dying 8-10 times a day and all your flight or fight mechanisms are clanging so loudly in your head and body it’s hard to hear anything above them.
When chemicals take away your ability to feel happiness or even remember what happiness felt like and your personality is stunned into helplessness and you forget the sound of your own laughter.
When you can’t stand long enough to take a shower and when the floor swoops and dips as you try any forward movement, and you’re stuck within 20 yards of your house before you can’t breathe.
When you forget all your words and any sustained thought causes chest pain, you can’t empathize or reach out, or remember a text from earlier in the day.
When your already terrible hearing is suddenly dimmed to the point you can’t hear anyone, you laugh when other people laugh, but you never heard the joke.
When your safe foods dwindle to nearly none and you’re losing weight and insomnia makes you grateful for 4 hours of interrupted sleep, your horizons become very small.
You’ll try your best.
You’ll wait for the few minutes a day when you think you’ve got it.
And maybe you’ll be right.
And maybe you’ll have to try again tomorrow.
The Friend Manual: How to make friends when you're bad at it 