DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I was wondering if you could help me out with friendship dynamics.

I met this really cool girl, we’ll call her Zoe, about 3 months ago. We hit it off immediately: 3-hour conversation, lots in common, super easy to talk to, soul-sister kind of feeling. She’s a much more extraverted person than I usually hang out with, but that made me excited because she’s connected with this big group of other cool people. When I first met her, I got a weird feeling about her personality, but it was hard to place why and because the connection felt good, I brushed it off as me having too high expectations for people.

This girl and her husband host a weekly get-together at their home, which they use as a sort of open house to connect with their friends. The first time I went, it was amazing. Fun games, great conversation, etc. All the people were nice. In addition, Zoe came over to hang out with me at my house a few times and we hit it off just like the first time we hung out.

The problem is that the connection seems to be tapering off, and I don’t know why.

I got sick recently, starting about a month ago, where I can’t drive and the doctors aren’t sure what’s wrong (I’m not contagious). So I haven’t been able to really get out of my house and I haven’t been able to make it to any of the weekly get-togethers or other things my new friend group has planned, such as hiking trips and other social events on the weekends. I told my friend what was going on with me around the time I first got sick, and she seemed concerned and sympathetic in text messages, but that’s as far as it went.

This is kind of where the issues started. I haven’t seen her in a while because I can’t drive. My sickness makes it hard to be out and about so I haven’t risked catching a ride to her place. I invited her over to my place to hang out but she said she was busy and was so sorry. After a while, she started not replying to my texts as much (I send one maybe once a week and she replies about half the time). She also never checked in on me to see if I was doing ok, and it started to feel awkward reaching out to her, knowing I was probably going to get rejected, either by being turned down for hanging out or just not receiving a response at all. I know that she’s been extremely busy socially lately as well.

I don’t know if my expectations are unrealistic, but here they are so it’s clear where my mind goes when I’m anxious: A good friend would have checked in on me to see if I was getting better from my sickness. She hasn’t. A good friend would have tried to see me or reschedule knowing that I can’t go anywhere, but she has not. A good friend would have responded to my texts eventually, even just to let me know she got them, rather than ignoring them entirely. She’s apologized for not responding to my texts in the past, saying how much she cares for and misses me, but the behavior doesn’t change and I don’t see any actions supporting her words.

I know this friendship is young (again on the order of a few months), but I can’t help but get the intuitive hit that this girl is more self-centered than she initially let on. I have another close friend who said he’s seen similar patterns in people. Essentially, they make sure that you’re attached to them and love them and go over to their place to hang out, but once they know you’re hooked, they sit back and relax. I don’t want to believe this is the kind of new friend I found. I’d hate to lose this friend because she’s sort of the self-titled “leader” of this new group and I like a lot of the people I’ve met within it, but it feels really crappy being ignored, especially when I’m sick. And to be honest, I miss her. Again, she’s cool and fun to hang out with.

Are my expectations too high? Do I have a blind spot that I’m unaware of that’s making me the problem in this situation? I’ve often suspected I have social dynamics struggles since I haven’t been able to maintain friendships for more than 2-3 years since I was little, and I also know that I’m super sensitive and have some anxiety that gets in my way. I also have a tendency to assume people don’t like me and don’t want me around, when in fact I’ve been told I’m a joy to be around and very socially calibrated (I think I just learned the motions and can act well). So I know these things are increasing my anxiety around the situation and I’m wondering if it’s not just me and my own issues.

Any insights for me? Assuming there’s absolutely nothing wrong, and this is normal for new friendships, do you have any tips on how to maintain connection? I haven’t accused her of anything because I don’t even know if she’s done anything wrong!

I don’t want yet another new friendship to fizzle simply because I don’t know what I’m doing. This has happened to me before, and in the past I’ve just stopped reaching out altogether, losing the friendship entirely.

Sincerely,

Sick and Abandoned

DEAR SICK AND ABANDONED: There’re a couple of possibilities here, SaA.

The first is that you may have rounded up the level of the connection that the two of you had. This isn’t all that unusual; we feel the thrill of New Relationship Energy with platonic relationships just as often as we do with romantic or sexual ones. You met someone who’s really cool and you really enjoyed spending time with. It’s understandable that you’d feel strongly about this new connection you had. Unfortunately, the fact that we may be excited about a new relationship – regardless of the type – doesn’t always mean that the person we’re excited about feels the same way. It could well be that while you were super-hyped to have this awesome new person in your life, she didn’t feel the same way. Not that she didn’t like you or didn’t think that you were cool, just that she didn’t necessarily see you as her new BFF.

The second possibility is that your absence meant that the two of you weren’t able to keep the friendship going to the same level. One of the things we rarely think about is that friendships take both time and maintenance. It can take weeks or months to really solidify a friendship beyond being acquaintances and even then, those friendships have to be maintained. It takes seeing each other at least once every couple of weeks to keep a friendship going and preventing them from starting to fade. Considering how recently you met her and how much your illness has incapacitated you, the fact that you haven’t been able to put in those keeping-the-connection-going moments may mean that your friendship meter started depleting. This has nothing to do with you and everything to do with just the way humans form and build social networks. Without active maintenance, they start to go away. Since she’s been planning more active outings that your illness has been preventing you from attending, then it’s that much harder for you two to get together and cement those bonds.

Another possibility is that she’s a little benignly self-centered; she tends to prefer things on her terms, including when and how she sees her friends. If her open-house events are her preferred way of maintaining those social networks, then the fact that you haven’t been able to make it – through no fault of your own – meant that she simply didn’t think of seeing you more often.

Along the same lines, if she’s a real social butterfly, it could well be that she’s topping out at the number of friendships or connections she can reasonably maintain; we all have only so much emotional bandwidth and we can only reasonably maintain so many social connections before some of them start to fade.

It could also be that your illness makes her uncomfortable, or that she’s just selfish and doesn’t like putting herself out there for folks she’s not already close to.

There’s not really any way of knowing, and speculating past a certain point isn’t helpful. It’s too tempting to blame yourself or go down unhelpful roads that aren’t actually connected to reality.

Now all that having been said: I think the likeliest explanation is that your connection wasn’t as tight for both of you. Not everyone bonds with other folks super-quickly and you may have had expectations that she wasn’t going to be able to fulfill at this stage in your friendship. Which is a damn shame, to be sure.

But what I wouldn’t do is assume that this is because people don’t like you. As with romantic or sexual relationships, sometimes we’ll meet people who we have insane chemistry, but we simply aren’t compatible with on some fundamental level.  And it may well suck, because they’re awesome, but it circumstances mean that it just can’t work out. Similarly, just as with romantic or sexual relationships, not every friendship is meant to last forever… or even for terribly long.

If your illness eases up or you find a treatment that makes it easier for you to get around, then it may be possible to rebuild that connection and even put in the time it takes to solidify things. Or it could well be that, circumstances being what they are, this is a friendship that you may have to let go of and prioritize ones where your friends are more willing to make space for you and your restrictions.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I find myself having a bit of an issue as the current political climate here in the US gets more and more tense.

I’ve been in a relationship with a guy for about four years, living together for most of that time. We have our typical couple ups and downs, but mostly things are good between us. He and I have never seen eye to eye politically, but he was always willing to engage in meaningful discourse.

Recently, and I think in large part due to some new friends he’s made, I have noticed my boyfriend's social media account become more and more vitriolic and hateful. He’s been following and supporting the likes of Ben Shapiro and other extreme-right personalities. He’s been spouting the extreme right talking points like gospel across his social media platform (though he never directly posts or shares these things, he is active in comment sections perpetuating this BS). It hurts me that someone I love is being so openly sexist, racist, and classist. I’ve tried talking to him about it, but he shuts down discussions with “I guess we just have to agree to disagree”.

I’m at my wits' end. Even though he doesn’t treat me any differently, with every comment I read it’s harder to see the man I fell in love with. I guess my question is should I be willing to ignore s

tty opinions if they aren’t being brought into the relationship directly? But if he’s willing to say that people like me (disabled, economically disadvantaged, female) are trash in social media posts, what does it say about what he thinks of me as a person? Should I just get off social media so that I don’t see these things anymore? I’m just a little lost and confused right now. I could really use an outside perspective.

 Left Behind

DEAR LEFT BEHIND: It's never easy when someone you love seems to have lost their goddamn mind, LB. Especially when you can see them doing that long, slow slide towards fascistic thinking, enabled by self-proclaimed suuuuuuper geeeeeeeeniuses, lobster daddies and failed gorilla-minded pick-up gurus. It's a pattern that's unfortunately not uncommon, especially for people who spend a lot of time getting caught in a YouTube spiral by an algorithm that is custom-built to be gamed by bad actors by equating conflagrations in the comments section with "engagement". It also doesn't help when the stalking horses for the alt-right are the faux-civility "Come, let us REASON together" types who insist that they are ever so civil and logical despite having no actual arguments beyond incoherent shouting. It helps create the illusion that the person in question is somehow being "reasonable", while, in fact, saying horrendous s

t and demanding that people engage with them in bad faith. The arguments are solipsistic garbage, the reasoning are pure appeals to emotion and all of it is a matter of playing to pre-existing prejudices while insisting that they're very smart and iconoclastic for saying things that actual, rational society has deemed as racist, classist and frankly unacceptable.

It's something of a design flaw in white male operating system that they can be so easily duped by someone in a suit saying something confidently over and over again. Even when it makes no goddamn sense.

Part of what makes this so sinister is how much this preys on actually reasonable people's cultural programming to avoid conflict. Case in point: the fact that your boyfriend insists on never engaging with you - likely because he knows that's a game that ends with his no longer having a girlfriend. He's relying on your having been acculturated to wanting to avoid causing offense or make trouble by making him upset. This is why he shuts the conversations down with "agree to disagree". It lets him continue the illusion of being "reasonable", while not actually challenging his beliefs or admitting to how he actually feels. He knows at some level that actually engaging with you about this is a losing game. If he did so, he would have to confront the hateful things he says apply to you just as much as the made-up "other" he's railing against online. In that case, then one of two things happens: either he starts to put a human face (yours) to the stereotypes he insists are ruining America and change his views... or you drop kick his ass to the curb so hard that it goes back in time and his grandparents get divorced retroactively.

Here's the thing: he is bringing those beliefs to the relationship; it's just that he's currently not doing anything directly to you. It's not as though he's an entirely different person from the screed-writing hate-monger he's being online. He's not the mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll until someone puts a keyboard in front of him, whereupon he turns into the Intellectual Dark Web's Mr. Hyde; he is the exact same person, even when he's putting a smile on and pretending that he didn't just deliver a rant about degenerates that just happens to include people like you.

(Hell, I'm willing to bet a not insignificant amount of money that you're his defense against getting called out for his hate. "Well I can't possibly be X, Y or Z, I'm dating Left Behind!")

So no, in no way, shape or form should you ignore his sh

ty opinions. The fact that he participates in the behavior that makes social media a damned hellscape and contributes to hate against marginalized folks isn't something you can compartmentalize off just because he isn't doing it to you yet. It's part of who he is and part of his identity. And frankly he doesn't get to pretend the stink doesn't stick to him just because so far he keeps it to online spaces. Much like folks who reside in troll farms that insist that they're just doing it "for the lulz" or "ironically" and that they don't mean it, "ironic" hate is still hate. You can roll your eyes while you f

k a goat, but you're still deep in ungulate.

You may want to take some time to watch the Alt-Right Playbook series of videos by Innuendo Studios on YouTube. It'll give you an idea of not just how he became radicalized, but how the alt-right's arguments work. It won't necessarily show you how to change his mind back, but at least you'll understand how someone you loved got seduced by bigotry and hate.

But to be perfectly frank, I think you should dump this guy with the quickness; you're not going to be able to deprogram him with your love or your body. One of the first rules of dealing with cult members is that you don't debate cultists. You aren't going to change their mind and they're going to have a much easier time backing you into a corner where you feel like you're obligated to go along with their bulls

t. You don't want to try to out-logic them because they don't care about logic. Logic, to them, means "I make you upset by saying horrible things and you react to them like a reasonable person would." Actual, demonstrable logic and honest intellectual discussion would require them being willing to acknowledge things like the systematic nature of racism or how many racist ideas are post-hoc arguments about situations that minorities were forced into by the ruling class following the abolition of slavery.

He ain't gonna want to do that.

More to the point though is that logic won't change his mind because logic didn't change it in the first place. It was an appeal to emotion that got him there. Now if he was going to actually engage with you about his views - instead of just shutting you down - then you could point out to him what you said to me: that he's calling you, specifically, trash. When he argues that you're different, you can press him for just how he doesn't mean you when he says that the other people - who fit the same description as you - are any less valid or real. Maybe, maybe, it might make him realize how full of s

t he is.

But I doubt it. Unfortunately, our brains have robust defense systems that reject ideas that challenge our perception of our identity. Since he's put himself in the position of being both the aggrieved party and the Superior Man Who Is Speaking Uncomfortable Truths, he's going to ignore the inconvenient liberal bias of reality and respond with insults while he doubles down on his beliefs.

What you need to do is stop letting that cultural programming keep you in a situation you know is untenable. It's time for you to quit worrying about not causing a scene; you should be causing a scene. This is the exact sort of situation where causing a scene and making trouble is called for. Your boyfriend started becoming a bigot. That's a dealbreaker and he needs to face the consequences for those actions... including getting bounced so hard he achieves low-Earth orbit.

I think you should move out and dump him. And when you do - preferably from a safe distance - let him know, in no uncertain terms: you're leaving him because of his hate.

Maybe seeing what this has cost him will make him reflect on his choices. But that's on him to do. You need to do what's best for you, and what's best for you is to GTFO.

Good luck. And write back to let us know how you're doing.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: This year started out pretty rough for me. The girl I had been dating, we shall call her M, and I decided it was best to break up (more like she decided she didn’t want to be with me anymore and I simply felt like I couldn’t make her stay in a relationship she didn’t want) She offered to stay friends but whether it was my pride or my stubbornness I wanted nothing to do with it. I still loved her and being friends was off the table for me. We never spoke since the breakup.

The months that followed were rough. I would keep scrolling through my photos and look at pictures of her and I together and would fall into feeling of loneliness and depression. I decided to head out and hit the gym and spend time with friends. I’ve lost weight to the point that I had to buy new clothes for I went down two sizes. I also decided to apply for a new position at work and got offered an even higher position than the one I initially applied too. I’ve also started talking with other girls and have gone on dates. It feels like life is turning around but, I still can’t stop thinking of M. I do find myself wandering into her instagram page and seeing her life going well without me, and I am happy she is fulfilling all of the things she told me she wanted to do. Contacting her is out of the question as she shut that door, locked it and threw away the key. Sometimes I think I miss the idea of her, the feeling of having another person that connected with me like she did. It got to the point that the excitement of my new job wore off and I felt lonely again.

Is this a normal feeling? How do I overcome it? It just feels like whenever I take a step forward I end up taking two steps back. I’ve tried living my life without “checking up” on her but I get anxious not knowing about her.

In Love With (Her) Ghost

DEAR IN LOVE WITH (HER) GHOST: I hate to say it ILWHG, but you're kind of the author of your own misery here. The reason why you aren't able to get over her is because you keep reopening those wounds. You keep taking a step forward by focusing on some post-breakup self-improvement, and you're making strides physically but you keep undoing all the emotional work you've been doing. Every time you go strolling through her Instagram, you're summoning the Ghost of Futures Past, a painful reminder that the future you two would have had together no longer exists and that hurts.

But here's the thing: the reason why you get anxious about not knowing about her? It's because you're still holding out hope that she's still single. That she hasn't moved on yet. That she hasn't replaced you. You dress it up as being concerned about her and wanting to see that she's living all the dreams she said she was going to live... but it's ultimately about holding onto the hope that maybe there's still a future where the two of you get back together.

Small wonder you're bleeding away all that progress. You're never going to get over her if you're constantly double-checking to see if she's still single or if she's dating someone else or comparing yourself to her new guy.

Part of why this still hurts is that you're still defining yourself by the fact that you are her ex. Getting over someone means putting your relationship with them behind you and moving forward. You aren't doing that. You may be part of her past, but she's still very much part of your present, and that's killing your forward momentum. Every time you build up a head of steam and start making progress, you sabotage it by checking in on her.

You're never going to get over her until you can let go of her. And you're never going to do that until you stop angsting over the inevitability that yes, she will be dating someone else. And I am here from the future to tell you that when it happens, it's going to kick you square in the junk like you just got dumped a second time for funsies.

So it's time to do the only reasonable thing: you need to let her go. And to do that, you need to do the one thing you haven't been willing to do: you need to give yourself closure by taking the Nuclear Option and block her Instagram, her Twitter, her TikTok, everything. It's not that she dumped you and now she's dead to you, it's that you are never going to heal if you keep picking at the wounds. As long as you're going back and letting the ghost of your relationship haunt you, you're never going to be able to put her behind you. This chapter of your story has come to it's natural conclusion. It's time to start writing the next one.

Block her accounts and move forward. It'll be ok. I promise.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I started reading your column a couple years ago and it helped me through some issues in my first real relationship, but things have changed beyond what I can process solo. Asking for help is something I have trouble with, but I’m at my wit’s end. Maybe I’m missing something, maybe I just need a jolt to get me moving again, but I could really use a second opinion.

The backstory: a year and a half ago, my life was on track — my courses were going well, I had three straight appearances on the Dean’s list, and (after managing some minor depression while simultaneously working two jobs and taking three upper level summer courses) I found myself in the first serious (actually, first, period) relationship of my life. I was busy, but happy. I had enough credits to graduate, but needed another year to do my student teaching.

A little over a year ago, my life started to unravel. During my student teaching, I worked harder, and more, than I ever had before in my life. Paperwork, planning, creating materials, teaching, grading — they consumed me. I had had to leave my other jobs to make time, and I was living off my savings (paying for rent, utilities, groceries) while working 80+ hours a week for no pay. My marginal social life vanished, my sleep schedule became increasingly disturbed, and my panic attacks, which I had conquered six years earlier, returned in force. Somehow, I kept my long distance relationship intact.

Eventually, it became too much. Sleeping maybe four hours a night, on an even tighter budget because of dental work on a broken tooth, and with my panic attacks coming four or more times a day, I withdrew from the program. I was convinced that if I didn’t quit, the job was going to do permanent damage to my health.

As a result, my GPA was heavily dented (diminishing my chances at grad school), and I was left with an almost unusable degree in history. Cue six months of job searching, of trying desperately to convince employers that I was worth their time, that a history degree was incredibly versatile, that I was readily adaptable to any number of fields. Rejection after rejection piled up. I became depressed, but kept trying. My family applied pressure, disappointed that I hadn’t been strong enough to follow through and become a teacher.

Then, my girlfriend broke up with me, effectively saying that the whole time she’d felt she was working down a “relationship checklist.” She’d basically never really felt all that much for me. She stayed with me because of her own insecurity. We’d been together a year.

Two days later, I had to put my dog to sleep. My best friend was dying of cancer, and I couldn’t watch him suffer anymore. This, combined with the breakup, with the shame of failure, the sense of years wasted—this broke me.

Today, I’m 24 years old. I work in a presumably dead-end job in a grocery store, bachelor’s degree seemingly irrelevant, and live in a tiny studio apartment crammed next to the workshops on the family farm, because it’s the only place I can afford. At work, I am surrounded by people, but there, as in every part of my life, I am alone. Isolated, insignificant, all the potential I used to feel drowned in the bath. My breakup left me with staggering trust issues, a paranoid fear of ever being vulnerable again, and a jealous not-quite-hate of everyone who has real, genuine love in their lives. My depression has seemingly sunk into my bones.

I’ve tried online dating, but conversations peter out, everyone ghosting on me within a message or two, no matter how polite, interested, etc. I am. The last two times I tried to ask someone out in person, a panic attack hit, stopping me from getting the words out. My work schedule doesn’t align with any of my few remaining friends, preventing me from seeing them much more than once every couple of months, and that number is about to get smaller, as my best friend is about to leave to take a lucrative job on the other side of the country. I doubt I’ll get to see her again.

My psychiatrist is changing my meds, so that will help with the depression, but it won’t change any of the underlying issues. I’m trying to be proactive, trying to be more social, but the social anxiety is just getting stronger, and even though I’m happy for my friend, glad she has this amazing opportunity, I can’t shake a sense of betrayal at her leaving. Our relationship has always been completely platonic, totally safe, and she was the one person I had left I could always be totally honest with, and know that she would be the same- honest, that is.

My work leaves little time for my art, which is the one thing that still brings me any lasting happiness. One day working at my craft is generally enough to keep me going for a day or so, but those free days are few and far between. And much as I wish I didn’t, I still want to connect to people, even just one person. Maybe especially one person. It’s so much easier to be myself, to be comfortable with myself, if I know that someone other than me likes me. Even just one other person.

But looking at my life right now, I can’t see why anyone else would want to be part of it.

Anyway, there are a bunch of issues all tangled up in those last few paragraphs, and I would really, really appreciate it if you could offer advice on even one of them.

Please, thank you, and please,

Barely Holding On

DEAR BARELY HOLDING ON: I’m reminded of a somewhat famous quote: “If too much weight is placed upon [the average man].. they snap. How does he live, I hear you ask? How does this poor pathetic specimen survive in today’s harsh and irrational environment? I’m afraid the sad answer is, ‘Not very well.’ Faced with the inescapable fact that human existence is mad, random, and pointless, one in eight of them crack up and go stark slavering buggo! Who can blame them? In a world as psychotic as this… any other response would be crazy!”

The idea is that everyone is just One Bad Day away from snapping and that anyone will break if things just get bad enough.

Sounds familiar, right?

I feel for you BHO. While I haven’t been exactly where you are, I’ve had my share of One Bad Days that came pretty close to breaking me. There was a point in my life when I thought I had the perfect job, working on a feature film with some names you would very definitely recognize. I was being paid to work with some good friends of mine doing a job I loved. I was dating a woman who I thought was damn near the idea of my perfect woman. Then it all fell apart. In the span of a week, I got fired from my perfect job, my friends no longer talked to me and my perfect girlfriend dumped me.

If one of my cats had died, I probably would’ve hit a downward spiral that would have taken me a long time to pull out of… if I did at all.

So I understand where you are right now; I’ve been there. But like the old joke says, having been there before, I also know the way out.

As weird and woo-woo bulls

t as this may sound… you need to do is change the story you tell yourself about what’s happened. You have been through The S

t, no question. You were going along, doing everything you were supposed to and leading a good life and then you had an entire mountain of s

t dumped on you out of the clear blue sky.

But here’s the thing: you survived. You made it through to the other side. Battered, bruised and beaten down to your knees… but you made it. You weren’t broken by all of this. You may have had to crawl for a while before you could stagger back to your feet, but the important thing is you got back up again. I mean look at you: yes, your life isn’t great right now. It’s certainly not where you wanted it to be. But you’re still moving forward.

You’re suffering from some emotional shell-shock, sure, but you’re doing all the right things. You’re getting help from a therapist. You’re afraid of being hurt again, but you’re still putting yourself out there. You’re working, you’ve got a place to stay, you’ve got friends and you have a creative outlet that you love. You’re trying to find love, be more social and put your life back together again.

Dude. That’s goddamn incredible! That takes an incredible amount of strength! I understand how it feels right now but you should be proud of the fact that you’ve survived and that you’re pulling yourself back together.

The mistake you’re making here is that you’re looking at your current circumstances as being permanent, a consequence of your supposed failure. But that’s not it at all. You’re not a loser who’s squandered his potential, you’re in emotional rehab. You’re a bad-ass who took as nasty of a hit as you could care to imagine and now you’re fixing things. This isn’t failure, this is someone who’s taking the time to heal, to get all of the various pieces put back where they’re supposed to be and get back out there.

Do you not see how goddamn amazing that is? Do you not recognize the strength and the courage that all of this takes? Of course you’re hurting. Of course you’re scared. You’ve been through the fires of Hell and you’ve got the ashes to prove it.

Shifting that mindset, recognizing that this isn’t failure, that it’s rehab for your life, your heart and your soul, will change your perspective and help you have a clearer idea of what to do. Part of that process, that responsibility to your rehabilitation is to not re-injure yourself. Like a runner who broke his leg, trying to force yourself back in the race before you’re ready just makes it harder to recover. You re-open old wounds and set yourself back because you haven’t fully healed yet.

As frustrating as it may be, you need to dial things back a little and focus on more immediate goals like your mental health. Addressing your depression and your social anxiety should be your first priority. Start with talking with your therapist about the social anxiety; that’s part of their job. But also, take baby steps to being more social and expanding your social circle. Start with a resolution to interact a little more with your co-workers. You don’t need to make friends with them, but simply opening up a little and being on conversational terms with them will go a long way towards easing that sense of isolation. As you start feeling a little more secure, consider finding a regularly scheduled meet-up or class that interests you and just commit to going. You don’t need to go and be a social butterfly; hell for the first few times, you may want to focus on just being there and being around other people. Then, as you start getting used to it and more comfortable… then you can start being a little more social. Not much, maybe just 10% more. But even that micro-victory will help break you out of this feeling that you’re hopeless and helpless.

As you improve, find ways to start moving your life forward. Your job may be a dead-end… or it may not be. It may just be your stepping stone to the next phase of your life. Look for your next step. It doesn’t have to be a big one; it just needs to be a step up from where you are now. That, in turn, leads to the step after that. And the step after that.

Those tiny victories, those micro-revolutions may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But each and every one of them is proof that your potential isn’t gone. They’re the little cracks in the wall of your depression, the reminders that as hopeless as you may feel right now, you have control. Those cracks may not seem like much, but they build up over time. Put enough cracks in that wall, and you WILL break through.

That’s the path to building your new life and getting healthy and ready to love again.

Look around you. This isn’t the end of your story; this is just the beginning of your first act. What has gone before is merely prologue; your future is still ahead of you and it’s full of glorious potential, if you’ve got the heart and the grit to reach for it.

You’re doing everything right, BHO. You’re putting in the work to rehab yourself and get ready to take that next step, and the step after that. You’re braver and stronger than you give yourself credit for. You’ve got this.

All will be well.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)