I'm sorry you thought I was saying those things, i wasn't, but your response did kind of back up what I just said.
you PERCIEVED that I was being negative towards you, that I didn't think you were being honest etc - but I never did think that way at all
Like i said, I've struggled with this issue myself, and maybe our situations aren't exactly the same, but maybe they DO have similarities.
While you say people were "giving eachother looks" perhaps they weren't thinking of you in the slightest when they were looking however they were....or perhaps they WERE thinking about you, but in an innocent way, perhaps they were wondering about you - just out of interest, rather than in a negative way like you percieved the situation.
You say they were trying to be nice - well, what's wrong with that? Isn't that what you're acutally looking for, maybe they were trying hard to be nice, but maybe that's because they wanted to be nice, not because they didn't want to - why WOULD they try to be nice if they didn't want to be? As a general rule, I find that if someone doesn't want to be nice, they simply won't be!
I do know how down it can make you feel when you feel like people are whispering about you and stuff... once in a while i would find that one of the people i went to youth group with would organise something and not invite me and i would immediately start thinking about how everybody disliked me and they didn't want to spend time with me. But you know what? That wasn't really the case at all (well, maybe it was once in a while who knows LOL - i wasn't exactly the cheerful person i am today) - but the simple fact was, I didn't have to be a part of everything every one of my friends did any more than all my friends had to be a part of every single thing I did - it's ok for people to not want to do stuff with the same people all the time, but i had percieved it as them indicating they didn't want me around - which turned out not to be the case - on MANY occassions I went down this path of thinking, and it sunk me deeper and deeper into self distruction (in a mental sense).
I remember one time at a youth group event someone was supposed to pick me up from my house, but he never showed up and the longer I waited the worse state I got myself in thinking about how much everyone must hate me and how aweful it was that this guy deliberately avoided giving me my ride. I even got to thinking that he had conspired with other people to not pick me up so they didn't all have to put up with me being around. Eventually, I confronted the situation and it was a pure and simple case of the fact that the poor guy just forgot. but of course, at the time, i figured it was a lie (which is odd, cause i knew he wasn't ever a dishonest person - but in this case, "because he hated me" he must have been lying) but of course, he wasn't lying - it was an honest mistake....and i confess to having made similar honest mistakes myself - but I couldn't see it that way.....my mind had already convinced me otherwise.
There were other situations when I would get really upset with "friends" who did something or said something or thought something bad about me - thing is, they didn't do anything - but I was so insecure that without having any idea I was even doing it, i would CREATE a problem with my friends, i would get angry at them for being bad to me (even though they hadn't) and I would then get really upset, and start getting depressing thoughts about how everybody hated me and i must be some kind of freak that nobody really wanted to be around....that anyone who did spend time with me was only doing so because they felt sorry for me or whatever and that nobody really liked me at all.
Then....one day, God revealed to me what was going on. Suddenly - and it really was a sudden revelation - I discovered that I was subconsciously trying to protect myself from being hurt by someone I cared about. It sounds bizzare, but i created these situations where i believed someone was being nasty to me so that I had control over the situation - that way nobody could hurt me without my permission so to speak. By hurting myself (and essentially blaming it on someone else), I was stopping other people from doing anything that might hurt me, because I was already hurting you see. It's hard to explain - but as I said, it was my subconscious way of protecting myself - and i wonder if you may be suffering from the same problem (though I expect if someone had told me this before God revealed it that I never would have beleived them)
Eventually, slowly, I learned to change my thought behaviour, and whenever i heard myself saying "they don't like me" i would tell myself (and I found that saying it out loud really helped - though not while anyone was around!) that I knew that wasn't true, I knew people didn't hate me and when people asked how I was doing or whatever, that people really were interested. sometimes all i would say to myself is "you know that's not true" - whenever I started thinking that way.
It took a long time and even today on the odd occassion I'll need to tell myself that, but I'm so much happier now, so much better off for learning to heal myself of this problem where my perception of things was twisted
I can only pray as I write this long message that God will reveal to you that you may have some kind of problem like this (if indeed you do, maybe I'm wrong) and that you will be freed from the bondage as I have been.
*hugs* (and that is sincere)
I'll try and remember to pray for you whenever I see a message from you - I can't promise i will pray every day or anything because I find I have difficulty keeping promises like that because I can be undisciplined when it comes to prayer - but I will make an effort because I know you deserve it
I'm not trying to pick on you so don't take it as that. And about missing your ex when you feel unable to connect to people in social situations, I know Exactly how you feel. It sucks. But it's a part of reality. God is growing your character. He knows what he's doing.
