being a creep without meaning to be [fuck]

[Glides]

I call the nasty voice in my head that makes my life a living hell "Jerkbrain," and the reason why it's so powerful is that once in a blue moon, what it tells me to hate myself about or what I should be afraid of comes true, and then it has ammunition to fuel itself for years. It predicted my ex would abuse me, it predicted I wouldn't do well in school and that nobody would like me there. It's not right often, but it's right just enough to be taken seriously and now it's right again and it's metaphorically celebrating.

So here's what happened, and I will try my best to keep my biases from coloring the experience because this isn't a case of someone else being awful to me, but me being awful to someone else without even meaning to.

So I have been profoundly socially isolated for the past six months, the vast majority of my social group and I don't talk anymore, and so the vast amount of social interaction happens online now. I've turned into one of those people. I haven't really experienced loneliness of this scale since the end of high school and on top of everything else, I'm not coping especially well.

So I begin talking to a group online by chance, and there is one person in this group I <i>badly</i> want to be friends with. I'm realizing that I have this unhealthy tendency to see someone as better than I am, so I want to be near them as if somehow by association, they will make me a better person, and this explains why I kept making friends with really toxic people and dating who I did, because these are people who craved that kind of validation and took advantage of my awful boundaries. In fact, healthy boundaries are so thoroughly unfamiliar to me in any way that i tend to be caught off guard when I see what they actually look like.

Anyway, person within that group and though I have never met them, they display a lot of qualities that I wish I had in myself, and I very badly want to be their friend, and I'm engaging in the same bullshit I always do when I want to make a friend with a person. I didn't recognize this for a very long time, and how this cycle worked, and how I'd let anyone walk all over me if that's what it took. I hate myself so thoroughly that I'll accept any amount of punishment for it, and it's kinda cutesy at 18 but at 24 you have to begin to learn how not to do that.

I mean, the irony is that the less you try to make friends, the easier it'll be, and if you keep displaying that desperation to make people like you, they're going to unconsciously distance themselves, and that's why i've struggled so much in relationships and friendships because i do not have the self-esteem needed to think i can be anyone's friend or partner on my own merits.

Me and this person do not interact very much, nor does this person really interact much with anyone, but we do talk some and whenever we talk, i become very consumed by the idea that i have to get this person's approval, so i am insanely awkward talking to them. i'm currently in month six of the fucking spiral and i'm barely seeing or talking to anyone so often my interactions with people in this group is all that i'm getting. It's humiliating as hell to admit that but that's how far i've sunk. I still know people, everyone's busy, i'm barely seeing people, and this wasn't so bad until a few weeks ago where i discovered i wouldn't have any more work until September so now I've been trying to get myself out of my anxiety induced paralysis to figure something out for the summer.

What I tend to do with friends is that we send each other memes of random things, and so I sent her some too. Maybe it was related to something we'd talked about, I dunno, and she didn't respond to any of them so I made the huge mistake of assuming she'd simply hadn't been on her phone in her while, so as I kept sending memes to other people, I kept sending them to her too, I'd mentally keep track of what sorts of things we liked to talk about and so I did that with her too.

Today, she sends me a message saying that I've been messaging her too often, that her lack of response was an attempt to get me to message her so much, and that it's made her feel uncomfortable.

That is not me denying that she feels that, because obviously her feelings are valid and she didn't say anything insulting when she sent the message, but the confusion and shame comes from that I had no intention of violating any boundaries and yet I did without even realizing it. Something that the majority of people I still socialize with and I do is something that wasn't OK with her, and I was completely unable to read the silent signal she thought she sent that she didn't want me to do anymore.

So the point is not to complain and call her nasty names, because as I said, she has the right to feel that way, but I just want to know the best way to respond and properly apologize without it being some self-pitying party because as much as that is my impulse, that'll just make things worse. I've already pre-emptively muted the group in question (outright leaving out of nowhere would probably be too much).

The group in general hadn't been as responsive to me lately so I'm assuming she may have told other people feeling concerned, and so now the entire perception is that I'm a creep, so it's better to just run because I'm not gonna publicly apologize to the whole group, that's weird. What makes me feel even dumber is that there's another person in the group I do the exact same thing with and that person always responds and seems to like whatever meme I randomly sent, so I just feel like a dumbass for not being able to read between the lines again. One of my biggest frustrations in life is not being able to read people and not knowing how to properly interact with them and all of that comes back.

I also need to stress that I wasn't sending anything lewd, these were just innocuous things or an article I'd think they'd enjoy and I do that with a lot of people and now I have to wonder if everyone thinks I'm a creep, because this is one of my biggest fears coming to life before my eyes.

I just want to properly apologize and then mute everyone, leaving me lonelier than before, but also the safest option so people don't have to deal with me anymore because they all think i'm a creep. Nobody is around anymore, i'm always alone, I just want friends so goddamn bad and I don't have that anymore and I don't know why at the age of 24 I can't even socialize with people properly anymore.

I'm just so ashamed of myself.

[Enail]

That sounds like a pretty minor misstep, as far as these things go, even if it feels really uncomfortable. I'd just send her an "oh, I'm sorry! Thanks for telling me, I'll cut it out now," nothing too over-the-top, she doesn't need your guillt or self-flagellation. And then stop messaging her, and dial it back a little with the group till it seems more balanced. No need to leave the group altogether, this doesn't sound like a bridge-burning event, just let them see that you care about people's comfort and boundaries by respecting it without making it a big deal.

[Hielario]

Yeah, what Enail says sounds like a pretty reasonable idea.

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