For many who have challenges making friends, there is often a desire to connect with others. Many times, they will want to make friends with everyone that they meet. But sometimes, not everyone will want to be their friend, or others may want to become vulnerable to the individual and not feel what a true and genuine friend is.

As I have stated before, friends come in many forms. There are those that are in real life that you do things with. There are mutual friends that you may know through your close friends. There are those that you only know online through social media. Or there may be acquaintances that you call friends that you know through day service or work. Friends can come at various degrees of levels and types of connections. They also have various kinds of knowledge about them that you know them only so much for one reason or another.

It may seem like there is a desire to just connect with someone for one’s own likeness and attention to be liked or want to just have a conversation or connection to someone other than yourself. It is always important to be mindful of your own safety and well-being when it comes to getting to know who you are connecting to, especially when you are connecting to someone that you are connecting via a platform that you do not totally know who they are.

It is important to understand to start small in conversation and then expand as you each become comfortable. If there is a continual bad feeling, then there should be an exit from friendship. I have been in what some would consider friendships, but they were not where there were issues with the other party, and I would not disengage because I longed for the small part of connection that I did have without realizing that it was detrimental to my mental health.

Eventually, I got better at becoming more assertive about realizing that I do not have to connect with everyone that I see in the world. Especially when I had my last few relapses those that were genuinely concerned about me and want to see me for who I truly was stuck it out and allowed me to be myself while I was still in a state of self-discovery and figuring out where my identity sectors lied within. They are the ones that I knew that I could always count on regardless of how I was doing mentally. I did not have to act out of term or not take care of myself to realize that they were for me no matter what.

Most of all, I discovered that not everyone is not my friend, nor do they have to be just because they are putting “feelers” out there. Especially when it comes to protecting my mental health and my ability to navigate the many challenges that I face in life. I know that it is up to me to be the better person and navigate the friend networks and make sure that I keep a healthy mix of friends that are benefiting me, not hurting me.