Try twice as hard and I'm half as liked

I thrive on words of affirmation.

I want people to like me.

I try so hard to make people like me because, in the back of my head, it feels like if they don't like me, I've failed and there really is something wrong with me, like all the horrible things I heard growing up would be proven true.

I try to be a good person and a good friend because it's as if my subconscious thinks that if I am good to people, they will be good to me.

I try to be open with people even when it's hard because I want them to feel safe being open with me.

I try to be honest even when I'm scared because I would rather get the truth from them even if it hurts than be told lies.

And yet, in the past year alone, I've have several people, people whom I naively thought would be some of the few who would be in my life long term, decide they were done. Decide that I was too much to deal with, that I was not enough to be worthy of friendship.

I put more heart and dedication and love into my relationships with people than most do, and I still end up being told that I screwed everything up. Maybe I'm naive, but that seems wrong to me.

Every time it happens, I get thrown further and further into the pit of battling the negative voices who want to tell me it's all my fault. But as a dear friend told me, I need it to be my fault because if it's my fault, I can fix it. I hear voices from the dark corners of my mind tell me that I need to fix it. It's on me to fix it. So I beat myself up if I can't make it all better. I disregard the idea of both people being responsible for the state of a friendship for the notion that I'm a failure.

God gave me this heart for a reason. I have this passion for loving people for a reason. If other people have a problem with that, that's just it - it's their problem, not mine.