Advice to keep good people in my life?
Hello everyone! Before I start, let me tell a bit about myself as this my first post in this forum. I was officially diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome when I was about 12-13. I am currently 19. (Also, tl;dr alert)
So, I feel like I recently came to a bit of a depressing reality about my life. While I worked very hard to manage my symptoms of Asperger's and learn better social skills, I didn't realize until recently that I was far from truly "normal." With that in mind, I looked back at my time in high-school (and a brief semester in college), and it was pretty obvious.
The biggest sign was that I typically wasn't invited to hang out with anyone, and that whenever I did manage to hang out with another person, we kept a friendship going for a month and then they just up and leave my life, without ever hearing from them or hanging out again. Believe me, I try to socialize and maintain those friendships, too. Other times, I did have good friends that I knew for a long time, but they had massive changes in their lives and went separate ways (which is understandable).
Trying to contact them is not a guarantee to see them again, they never contact me back. When they do, I offer to hang out, and they say 100% of the time that they have other things to do (I mean, unless they're not anywhere near me, then I understand the complaint). They don't even try to make the time...
I realize now that having Asperger's makes me, to proper, well-adjusted (or sometimes just kind) people, awkward and they left me alone. Bad people saw me too trusting and therefore easily manipulated. Those people left my life because they wanted something from me, they got it, and just left. (And it goes without saying that I've been single my entire life)
Now, I have next to no contact with anyone outside my immediate family. I always try to ascertain ulterior motives, and sadly, most of the time I was right. I just never spoke up about it because at that stage in my life, I didn't want people to leave me (Well, not entirely. I do genuinely enjoy being nice to people, and I was too trusting of others as well. I had a very positive outlook on humanity then, until I knew better )
Now I have learned to be suspicious of people that try to get friendly with me now (which I think is something I really needed to stop being manipulated). Also, I think I do have a bit of a natural ability to read faces, eyes, and slight tones of voice, (I didn't realize it until recently because I never look people in the eyes) but strangely it seems to be the most accurate when I read people I know very well. I know now that if I can hone people-reading skills, I can find out who's lying to me.
So, how accurate are the things I learned? If my observations are wrong, what do ya'll think the issue is? Finally, the biggest question I have, is how do I find good people, and more importantly, how do I get them to stay in my life?
I find myself depressed now because there are so many things I want to do, but I have no one to share those moments with because they left me or didn't really care about me to begin with. Some direction would really be appreciated.
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