I’m a college student, halfway through my senior year. My core friend group right now is… kind of awful. They seem to really lack empathy and expect me to perform happiness for them like some kind of jester. This one time my freshman year, one of my friends got drunk and basically told me “We can all tell that you’re depressed, smolactor, and you’re bringing everyone around you down with you.”

Even if I try to say something like, “I’m having a rough day”, I am always met with vacant stares and silence from these friends. They ignore me and move on to other topics as if I never said anything. Sometimes they even talk over me or ignore what I say in a conversation- regardless of what it is. They joke about being concerned about me sometimes but that’s all it is- a joke. I feel like I’m always walking on eggshells around them, forcing myself to perform as happy or smiley or normal so they don’t say I’m “killing the mood”.

They don’t seem to be trauma-informed at all. Most of them seem to have some degree of mental illness, but none of them seem to understand complex trauma. They know that I’m homeless and estranged from my family, and have nowhere to go for breaks. But they often brag about how great their homes or families are, or how fun their break was.

Over quarantine, my friends stopped contacting me. I was isolated for a long time in a really bad situation. I kind of feel like my friends abandoned me at that time, and haven’t really forgiven them for that. Especially since one of my friends was like “oh quarantine was great I was baking and watching Netflix the whole time”. She was my best friend. She ghosted me for months.

How did I end up sticking with this group for so long? It’s pretty obvious they don’t care about me. These past few days, I was bedridden with a really bad virus and they didn’t bother to check on me or contact me at all. They pretty much just forgot about me and went on a fun trip to the city, which they later described to me in detail.

How did I end up surrounded by people who don’t give a shit about me? I’m kicking myself for this. But honestly, I’ve spent the past few years so dissociated that maybe I just didn’t even notice how much they were hurting me. I already feel isolated enough/ like no one loves or cares about me. What’s worse, I’m a senior now and have almost no other friends. I also live with these people so I can’t really avoid them.

I know that interacting with and living with them isn’t good for me but I’m already really struggling with a plethora of medical issues, etc. There’s too much on my plate already and I feel so trapped. Like there’s nothing I can do.