Therapy cured my anxiety by giving me depression,

Replaced my emetophobia with a bachelors in psychology.

I woke up late again today. I can't seem to get myself to wake up–or more appropriately, get up–early anymore. I hear my alarm and I awaken to not only turn it off, but become conscious enough to feel disdain towards the me that wanted to start my day at that time. Me on me crime. I spent the rest of the day being the one who wanted to wake up at the appropriate time. And then I have to lie to myself and try to stay hopeful that the me who wants to be there will wake up first, before the me that never does has time to fuck up everything again. And even if I do it right once, it only serves as a reason for the other me to fuck up the next day even more because how dare I? How dare I try to exist for more moments in my day? I still only have two friends here, and even then I only really talk to one of them. I don't quite like the other one if I'm being perfectly honest. But I shouldn't be perfectly honest because that's mean. She's a fine person but she has so many dormant flaws. I don't feel that it is my place to try and preemptively fix those dormant flaws nor do I feel that motivated to because I don't know what that would even entail. She's straight and cisgender and from the midwest and has an unresolved crush on Mordecai from Regular Show that I haven't confronted her about yet which lends itself to her pretentious takes on music with her music being the only "good" music and "teen girl" music being trash. Her identity, to the deepest foundations, is on a path to an existence that I would kill myself to avoid. But I think she would be happy, so I think I should leave that bubble unpopped.

It has never felt like a friendship that would go anywhere and I was wondering why because, again, she's a totally fine person. In many regards, our temperaments align with one another. But I think I just realized what it is. I don't want anything from her. Not a single trait from her personality is something that I would strive to view in my own arsenal one day. Is this shallow? I'm not after her material resources, after all. I don't think it's shallow. Personalities are what you are supposed to judge about a person. You know, the whole "content of his character," thing? But then, in order to be a good-willed human, do I go a step further and justify the parts I dislike about another human with the context of their past? How do I get to gauge the validity of a cause and effect relationship as vague as the spoken language allows it to be? At what point does God say it's okay to give up on personifying another person to your own liking just to guilt yourself into staying friends with them? When they are the one to relieve you of your friendship duties? Is that an act of God? The relief sure makes it feel like one.

I feel like I'm being over dramatic, but I don't know how I'm supposed to talk about this. Nobody ever prepared me for this. I can't just redact people from my life. Especially not when the reason is because we just don't "vibe".

This brings me to my next topic/person. This guy who the previous person introduced me to last quarter. We collectively stopped interacting with him last quarter because his "vibes" sucked and he seemed to constantly get in his own way; he desperately wants companionship but he's just so fucking awkward and anxious and... desperate. The desperation causes him to overcompensate for the anxiety and awkwardness by being too forward. He can't seem to figure out when in a new friendship the fragility of the affair dissipates and common interest takes those involved to more dynamic and complex areas of interaction. He's either completely misreading our interaction or suffering from impatience (or perhaps a mixture of both) as can be seen from the frantic switching between being clingy and passive and being offhanded and–what unfamiliar folks would likely label–annoying. Being able to pick up on his deep and agonizing internal strife puts me in a complicated position, however, because is it then my responsibility to help him correct his defective courting practice if I know that failing to do so in a timely manner will result in the extension of his suffering? How do I go about trying to help someone that I ultimately want nothing to do with? What is this counterintuitive desire that I am experiencing?

Last Wednesday, I attended an in-person lecture for the first time and was ambushed by his overbearing company once the lecture had concluded. To preface the next move I take in this story, I should mention that since I had returned to campus 2.5 weeks prior, I had been forced onto an alternative form of my usual stimulant medication which makes me more dispassionate than normal/preferred. Marooned with only my acknowledgement of his positively valanced existence relative to many of the humans I have interacted with in my lengthy 20 years of life and my desire to not be an asshole in that particular moment, I–and I'm not necessarily proud of this–indulged him and his inadvertently transparent yearning for human interaction. In the dispassionate state I was in, I then went ahead and therapized him in the most literal sense of the word–minus the credentials–for over two hours. While I'm not too quick to claim many things about myself, I am certain of the take that I am about to voice in writing: I am an emotional siphon. Sometimes I feel like a hustler or a con artist with how easily I can get people to spill their guts and lay themselves bare for me to poke and prod. You ask them questions that make them feel seen and leave some levity at the end as "bait" and that usually seems to do the trick. Of course, I am probably coming off as dismissive but I do not mean any disrespect to people's very real ills. That's why I do what I do, so that people can feel like they exist. I just call it being nosy in a constructive way. And let me not forget to share that the prerequisite for this formula to work is psychological strife. He had that in bulk. Red flag #1 was that he was slightly taken aback by my blunt acknowledgement of his social anxiety and history of submissiveness in friendships and other aspects of his life. To make a two hour therapy session short, I convinced him that he needed to speak to a professional to improve his anxiety symptoms (combat his tendency to catastrophize) and that he might need to look into an ADHD diagnosis. This was a lot for a 2 hour catch-up but I felt like I couldn't help myself, how the fuck was I supposed to engage in conversation with him about anything else when he's a poster boy for the warning signs of an incel in the making?

This does not make a good basis for a friendship, you see, because while a 2 hour therapy session that should have taken place 4 years earlier may feel very cathartic and intimate, there are codes of ethics in place that frown upon the friendship between a therapist and their client for a reason.

[REDACTED], we only talked about how you are in dire need of psychological help for 2 hours! This is not how friendship works!

I can't sit here and pretend that the confusion that will ensue because of the novelty of our interaction is his fault, of course. I was aware of the position I was putting him–an emotionally conflicted, friendless, virgin (self-inflicted title)–in when I inquired why he felt like it was his obligation, and his obligation alone, to upkeep his past friendship which ended when he put his foot down once (1), and then I followed up with how he may have learned this behavior by being the eldest child of 5 in a very large white family of rugged farm workers in central California. And I knew it when I assured him that subjecting himself to mental anguish and living in a constant state of closeted anxiety wouldn't ever make those things go away. You don't have to live that way, [REDACTED]. No matter how much worse you perceive the problems of others, your issues will always be worth seeking help for. This train of thought is just a way to evade the uncertainty of what not being in a constant state of worry might bring. The anxiety might be keeping you on top of things but if you feel like letting go for just a second will result in the collapse of everything you have ever known or accomplished then it is a far more detrimental force in your life than you are giving it credit for.

For someone who does not want to have this person in their life, these are very caring things to say to said person. That is confusing. I think I accidentally made him fall in love with me. Lucky for me, I told him that I am gay. Last quarter. So I have an emergency escape hatch if he tries anything and I can drop him on the basis of homophobia. Do you think God will side with him then?