Thanks for this, OP. Been sitting alone in my apartment and it's going to be nice to vent, even if nobody reads it.

So I'm in my early 20s. In early middle school I didn't quite pick up making friends or talking to girls as fast as everyone else did. I was a huge loser, had only a handful of friends that I didn't actually enjoy. Near the end of my first year, I met this girl. I'm going to call her Karen. Karen was great. She had long blonde hair, a smile that lit up the room, and a personality that made people want to be around her all the time. I questioned it at the time because I was so young, but now I'm pretty sure that Karen was my first love. I couldn't stop thinking about her, every stray though was devoted to her and I kept imaging what it would be like to be with her. And somehow I had the power to make her laugh at anything that I said.

We became fast friends, we would sit for hours and tell funny stories back and forth until we had to leave and couldn't possibly stay any longer. Then, Karen did an amazing thing. Karen made me realize that the only way I could be happy with who I am is by accepting who I am. I stopped trying to be "cool" and just started acting like myself. It was so liberating, and I found a whole new set of friends, many of which are still close friends of mine to this day. I was happy, and I had Karen to thank for it. But I never told her how I felt. She started dating my best friend, and the three of us would be together all the time. But occasionally they would sneak off to flirt, or whisper in each others ears, or do that thing where you smile and angle your head down slightly while maintaining eye contact. It crushed me inside, I hated watching it and I hated that she was with a friend I was so close with. They dated until the end of 8th grade when she moved across the country where she lives today. I spent the whole summer missing her and thinking about her, until finally I started high school and the new experience and new friends I met helped to get over Karen.

Things were looking good, Karen was off my mind and she had left me with the gift she had given me three years ago, the ability to be happy with myself. And by this point everyone else had begun to accept me too! Everyone in school loved me, I could make friends quickly with just about anyone and people genuinely enjoyed my company. I was the charismatic kid that had friends in any social group. But as far as activities outside of school I really didn't do much. I had a group of friends that I would hang out with on the weekends but I never had a girlfriend, I never went to any parties, and I very rarely just spontaneously left home to hang out with a friend. I was mostly fine with that but deep down I always knew I was missing out on something. I spent most of my nights in front of a computer screen playing games, alone. I was also hadn't made any close female friends since Karen.

So junior year I needed cash to fill up the gas tank of my new car. I got a job at the fast food place across from school. My boss was this sleazy Indian guy and he always managed to swindle me and the other employees into working way more hours than we were comfortable with, and probably more than we were legally allowed. It was long and boring. The rules were stupid and the customers were even stupider. But I had a great time. I have so many great stories from my time at that restaurant. I even met my current roommate there.

The summer in between my junior and senior year, my boss hired a girl from my school. Which was odd, because he was the poster child for workplace sexism. I will call her Jan. Jan had short blonde hair, big blue eyes, and a personality even more charismatic and magnetic than Karen. I had heard of Jan, and she had heard of me, we had a lot of the same friends but somehow we had never met. My boss began scheduling us from noon to close every Saturday and Sunday. Every. Single. Week. I'm not even really sure why we were open on weekends, because hardly anyone came in. This gave me and Jan a lot of time to know each other. We were pretty much forced to spend every weekend together so we talked about pretty much anything you could think of. Quickly we became inseparable. We discovered that we had a frighteningly large amount of things in common with each other. We shared everything with each other because we both shared the same likes, dislikes, opinions (mostly), insecurities, and worries. I was excited to have another female best friend, and there was no sense of dread because I didn't have any romantic feelings towards Jan and she didn't have any towards me.

Over that summer, my senior year, and the summer following, Jan helped me grow as a person even more. She dragged me out of the house to go to parties, concerts, drives around town, and spontaneous adventures. She unknowingly helped me realize that I had been spending too much time on my own and that there was a huge world outside for me to explore. I stopped with the hours on end game sessions and instead got outside to be with friends. Jan and I started hanging out so much that people start wondering if we were dating, including my parents who would not take no for an answer. But we didn't care, we just laughed it off.

But then one day we were closing the store. We locked the door and I got in my car which was right outside. She started to walk to the end of the lot where her car was. As I watched her walk to the car I suddenly noticed how pretty she was. I quickly shrugged the thought off. Jan and I had a good thing going, I didn't want to ruin it. Over my last summer my feelings for Jan grew. I kept trying to suppress them because I didn't want to lose Jan as a friend. Then Jan started dating this guy, some stoner she knew through mutual friends. He was an okay guy but the thought of her with another guy made me physically ill. I told myself it was just because I was worried about Jan. She was infatuated with this guy, the longer she was with him the more she would talk about him, and the more I would be hurt.

Jan and I ended up going to the same college, and by the time we started my suppressed feelings were like an anvil on my shoulders. During the second week of school Jan my roommate and I went to a fraternity party. I had been drunk before this but at the party I somehow managed to get through over half a handle of bourbon and I don't know how many beers. It was the most drunk I had ever been up to that point. Near the end of the night I cornered my roommate and told him how I really felt about Jan. Now that I had admitted it, it suddenly became more real for me. I started acting really clingy around Jan and I had difficulty masking my real reactions when she would tell me about something intimate that she and her boyfriend had recently done. She caught on and eventually confronted me about it. I told her that I was just feeling lonely and was projecting that onto her. I lied to her, I lied to our other friends, and somehow I had managed to lie to myself. I believed what I had said for awhile. Since we were in an almost completely new group of people and her boyfriend didn't go to our school the questions about us dating became even more frequent, and they started to bother her. They also began to make me question wether or not what I had said was true.

A few days before Christmas break Jan told me that she had been keeping a secret from me. She told me that when she went home for Halloween a few months prior her boyfriend had taken her virginity. She didn't want to tell me because at the time she still wasn't sure how I felt but that she was now confident that I could take the news. She was wrong. The thought of her with that other guy hurt over the entire course of our month long break. Then something happened over break that made her whole attitude change. She kept talking about "going on a journey" to "find herself" . Every day was a new speech about some life changing revelation that she had just had, and for some reason this gave her a judgemental and holier-than-thou attitude about anything. Now when I would talk to her about a personal problem or worry that I was having instead of receiving empathy and compassion I would be informed that the problem was my fault and I should just become a better person like she had.

Finally I realized that since December Jan had done more harm to me than good. Somewhere along the line I lost my best friend and a new Jan had ridden in on her high horse to replace her. I stopped talking to Jan in hopes that one day the old Jan I had befriended at the resteraunt would come back.

So now here I am. I'm over Karen and I'm over Jan but they're both living their happy lives with some other guy, Karen on the other side of the country and Jan right across the street, too good to knock on my door any more. Meanwhile I'm sitting in my apartment in the dark.

So I guess I'm bummed out because everyone seems like they're doing better than me. And I'm lonely.