Depression, Anxiety, or other Mental Health Conditions

I've found with work places that some people just don't see work as a place to 'make friends'. I think it's potentially unlucky on your part that the boys there don't see it as a social event whereas the girls do. What field are you in that it's 95% females?

The thing is, and I really don't mean this to sound mean, no one is obligated to be friends with you. People have told me they're lonely before and I sympathise with that, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be friends with them. Maybe our personalities don't quite click, or I have too much on, or I'm comfortable in my loneliness so don't want to hang out.

Work is very low in my list of places to make friends. Mainly as I like to complain about work and it's a risk when doing that with colleagues. From my last 2 jobs, and I'm a sociable person, I have one genuine friend who we get along brilliantly. Other than that, I'm simply not interested. That doesn't make any of us bad people.

Also my current work is 95% female and there's no female clique so I wouldn't assume that's going to be the case everywhere.

+1 for not making friends at work. I don't socialise with work colleagues at all and the idea of being "friends" makes my skin crawl.

I got added to a "company family" WhatsApp group the day a load of people got furloughed :dread:

Muted that gooseberry fool straight away. I wouldnt spend my lunch break with most of those people, let alone have endless chats going on at home.

I think you can "expect" (more or less) a bit of friendly chat at work, it's weird if no-one has fun at all. But you can't really expect to make best friends there - it's nice if it happens but you've got to accept it usually won't.

I'm lucky in that I genuinely like all of my work colleagues as people, and I'm very friendly in work (stop laughing! I am!), but I'll still only see them outside of work maybe a few times a year. And that's fine, we're colleagues who get along well but we all have our own lives outside of work.

Talking to Fade in particular: I do really sympathise with you because I know how it feels to be isolated IRL. There have been times when I've not really had any close IRL friends and it's very difficult. I'd really suggest you try other means to meet people to be friends with. A shared hobby or passion is a much faster way to form a bond than happening to do the same job after all.

Also, sorry to hear you've hurt yourself recently. Just to let you know in case it helps, the Samaritans aren't just for suicidal thoughts, they can also help you talk you through your pent-up feelings whenever you feel the urge to self-harm. If you're alone and feel like you want to hurt yourself again it might be worth giving them a ring so you can vent and hopefully avoid self-harm.

I think it would be a good idea to get into a hobby that intrinsically involves socialising like sports/martial arts/team exercise routines like cycling, D&D/tabletop gaming or music and find some relevant clubs to those to show up at.

I don't expect to make friends at work personally but I do chat with them sometimes (been a while), more often than not you need to respect other people's boundaries as much as whatever you want to get from that environment which is, at the end of a day, a salary and not much more is to be expected in my opinion.

False wrote:Ive gotten worse and worse but I suppose its helpful for the police to have a record, maybe it will assist in my defense

Saying that, literally the only reason my council got in touch about social support turns out I'm eligible for by law was because of a police report being filed for something totally non-violent and just myself wandering around aimlessly at night, it shouldn't go that far but it did.

I just cried in Tesco because they'd run out of peanut butter. I think I might be a bit on edge :fp:

. I have three CBT sessions on the NHS from 30th June. Bring them on :lol:

. Never have I meant a laughing emoji as little as I do in this post :lol:

You got 50% more CBT than me, I am well jel. Need to complete Silvercloud CBT programme in my own time for up to a year which, gives me plenty of room but kind of worried about forgetting about it.

Uni got back to me about the Coronavirus essay. They've acknowledged that it was probably wasn't the best plan to base an essay on something people are struggling with. But these are my options:

I can skip the essay and write a different one in the resit period in August
I can write the essay now but try to focus on anything positive and stay away from anything that hits too close to home

I'd rather not do the resit option, it leaves me in limbo for the entire summer and just causes more stress. I'm going to have to take the second option. I have a safety net in place in terms of grades (need 60% overall modules to pass, I'm on 69.87% and as long as I pass that frade won't go down). I'm just going to crank out an essay aim for the pass mark and put it behind me.

I know they had to throw a question together to replace the exam and they were thinking corona was topical, but would it have killed them to at least come up with two different questions? Or am I being to harsh?

That's a shame, I'm sorry they couldn't prepare a different question for you.

You said you were doing general modules, so can you give it any slant you want?

Maybe you could write something about environmental protection, as I know the lockdown has provided some useful case studies in air pollution clearing up and things like that. It's a bit left-field but you could arguably just mention coronavirus once in your introduction and then make the rest about environmentalism, or something like that. The fact that you have "focus on something you feel comfortable with for the essay" in writing gives you a lot of leeway with it (or at least would in my department!).

I got really lucky with work, I got really close with someone and now their friends become my friends and they're my main and honestly only friend group.

Karl_ wrote:That's a shame, I'm sorry they couldn't prepare a different question for you.

You said you were doing general modules, so can you give it any slant you want?

Maybe you could write something about environmental protection, as I know the lockdown has provided some useful case studies in air pollution clearing up and things like that. It's a bit left-field but you could arguably just mention coronavirus once in your introduction and then make the rest about environmentalism, or something like that. The fact that you have "focus on something you feel comfortable with for the essay" in writing gives you a lot of leeway with it (or at least would in my department!).

Thanks Karl, I think using as much leeway as I can is my best bet. By general modules I meant more that they weren't specific to East Asian Studies which I start next year (and after this semester I really can't wait). This module is Sociology (I thought it might be relevant since my degree was under Social Sciences. Only it's moving into Humanities next semester so I wish I hadn't bothered! Actually, that's probably not fair, overall I've enjoyed the module up until this point). I'm going to go with increased community spirit or something like that. I'll also make it international since it doesn't specify it has to be the UK. I may even tie it in to how Taiwan and South Korea dealt with it as a society just to make it a bit more relevant to the subject I'm studying in September

Re: Friends at work

I have been at my employer (large utility provider in the private sector) for over a decade, during this time it has employed 2000-2500 people.

I have been part of plenty of social activities, i.e. meals out, drinks, played sports, etc, studied and worked collaboratively towards qualifications and accreditations. I am fortunate to call some of these (maybe 10?) lifelong friends of varying demographics but they represent only a tiny fraction of the people I have become acquaintances with.

No matter how charming you might be, it can and often is very difficult to forge genuine friendships in the workplace.

Mini E wrote:I just cried in Tesco because they'd run out of peanut butter. I think I might be a bit on edge . I have three CBT sessions on the NHS from 30th June. Bring them on . Never have I meant a laughing emoji as little as I do in this post

If they didn't have marmite peanut butter and I was craving it I think I'd be close to the waterworks myself. I hope the therapy helps.

Last few weeks have gotten particularly bad for me. Lately I've been tinged with panic, sometimes bordering onto full-scale panic attacks, and it's made the day to day really difficult. I'm basically just trying to pacify myself while desperately looking for work opportunities. Thankfully things are starting to turn up there, but it still wouldn't be until the beginning of July at the very earliest, so I'm still looking at another 3 weeks minimum of this current cycle. Even the 'good' news (hearing back from potential jobs, setting up interviews) has got me reacting with nervous energy, like I don't even know how to control my bodily and mental responses. I'm grateful that I've got an excellent amount of friends I can talk openly with (and Falsey) and they provide me with a lot of support, some generously giving their time to talk me down when I've been on the edge. I know I'll get there eventually, and getting away from here and back to work will help massively, but the (physical) social isolation and stagnation of my life (and yeah, being coldly dumped) has properly broken me down, and these next few weeks are going to be a real challenge to keep myself on track and not slip further into it.

When it comes to friends at work, I only ever made 1 friend in work when I was 16, never did in any other job. We used to regularly hang out and he would stay in mine and another friend's flat a lot. Not seen him in years now, then again I haven't seen any friend irl for 7 years+. I forgot what a friend is.

Surely friendship happens organically? You can actively put a stop to it, which could be necessary depending on the context of the working relationship, but it sounds fairly unusual for friendship-building in general to be an active/contrived process.

some people dont find it natural

Depression, Anxiety, or other Mental Health Conditions

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