Hi everyone,
I feel like I have a huge roadblock in my life right now with the idea of making new friends. I am in a super transitional period where I have severed ties with a lot of my old friends and now don't have very many anymore. A lot of people I used to hang out with weren't the best influences and my family has told me that they think I am better off without most of them (I went to school, got a good job, make decent money now while many of them didn't progress in life) but I'm sure it's safe to say that my social life is the area where I feel like I am completely lacking now.
I feel like it is very hard to trust people. I had a past friend try to turn other friends behind my back a couple of years ago, and it's just made me paranoid to open up to people like I did when I was a bit younger. In addition to this, I live in a Marxism-riddled city and I do not identify with this ideology, making it even harder to assume that people aren't like 9/10 of who I went to school with. It has gotten to the point where I think I know what I need to do to break out of this rut, but have psychologically dug myself into a hole where I now feel like going out to meet people is this giant task I never knew I'd have to face without the help of school or other forced social settings.
Has anyone else ever been in this situation? What did you do to cope?