Your “this is all just business as usual” tone really isn’t serving. Your President is trying to economically soften my country for later seizure and has openly made commentary about taking other countries in acts of international war. He has pardoned armed Insurrectionists who in the past tried to disrupt through violence the democratic transfer of power in his favour. He has invited to his cabinet heads whose entire manifesto they signed was gutting the past 100 years of regulatory law and administrative arms of government that was created by democratic processes and invited one of the most powerful people in the world to head the project who threw two Nazi salutes at an Inauguration whose decorating recalled the Confederate flag moreso than the stars and stripes. He’s refurbished Gitmo and has been utilizing ICE agents to speed the forced deportation of people, some of them on military planes in purposefully inhumane conditions. Every Executive order creates a new flood on the courts which will take years to fully sort out and in it’s wake databases are being seized or deleted, food deigned for relief efforts are rotting on shelves, proposals are in progress to strip voting rights for anyone who has ever changed their name which will hit women particularly hard. Trans people have already been denied travel, and denied new travel documents, any documents regardless of gender marker and had their existing documents seized at passport offices. He’s signed into order an order that was intended to force judges to apply the death penalty to any crimes where it could be an outcome. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-the-death-penalty-and-protecting-public-safety/) What future purpose can you imagine this holding?
Congress, The Senate, the judiciary… Those bodies require process and deliberatiom, in other words time, and the President and his cronies have decided to just speed break things and push failure states and force compliance knowing that picking up the peices will be an infinitely slower process.
And blaming the voters? During the election Republican grassroot efforts disenfranchised a ridiculous number of voters because people sought out visible minorities or people who showed obvious Democratic party leanings and reported them to elections Office en mass which automatically struck them off the rolls until they could be investigated but since there was limited manpower to investigate so a lot of them were frozen without challenge. Those that did vote for Trump did so on promises that any idiot should have known was not in his legal power to fix and ignored his blatant desire to strip reproductive rights, remove trans people’s healthcare and banish them from public life, ignored a manifesto outlining the plans of his sponsors and a lot of racist, homophobic, sexist and authoritarian commentary on the campaign trail. If you have someone who decided enough was enough and left your life because of your vote for “better grocery prices” then yes, it’s deserved.
At what point have you crossed the Rubicon? When are you going to draw the line between “not a coup” and “this is a coup”? Will it be after this bunch of appointed ministers to the king commits an act of outright international war? Tell me, where is the line because I am pretty sure you should already be in the street protesting. Outside of the US the rest of the world is already discussing the US in terms of a failed Democracy. People who have experience in the feild of International Law are ringing the alarm. Why aren’t you?
It is probably the case that if your friends do veiw you as a friend and aren’t made aware that this isn’t because of something they did but a way you are then this behaviour is likely hurting them to some degree or another. Your discription of how you interfsce with friends is fairly consistent with cluster B personality disorders but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically bad. It does mean that if you want to become a safe person to associate socially with you are going to need to put in more work than average to learn what other people generally need out of relationships and to recognize pain that is going to be difficult to empathize with… And if you decide to become a safe person it will mean being more open with your friends about parts of the human experience that are assumed but in your case not shared.
Most people have needs out of friendships that if they are not met and they cannot identify why they are not met they can sort of look inwards and self emotionally mutilate, picking themselves apart to find what it wrong with themselves to warrant cold behaviour. People’s first instinct is to ask “what about me makes me undeserving.” and are very good at populating a list.
Guilt and shame for most of us is the fastest emotional response. It is way faster than reason. People who think they may have wronged you or are being rejected by you will feel guilty first and then have to pick the emotion apart to figure out if they should actually feel guilt or shame… and then even if they realize they did nothing wrong might still feel guilt or rejection. A lot of being a safe person regardless of whether one has disordered emotional issues or not involves making sure they have the tools to not feel guilt, shame or rejection for very long. The faster they can rationalize and compartmentalize what is happening isn’t about them it is about you the more likely it is to not stick and develop into a longer term emotional injury or weakness. Once someone has been put in a position to effectively bully themselves that creates possible long term damage. A lot of the time, particularly for young people first experiencing this who have not learned how to be safe around people with cluster B disorders the outcome resolves as long term anger towards the person who made them question themselves.
If your friends are growing apart it may be because they already think you do not care about them and have already gone through this self bullying process but have now started to trade notes to see if they are the problem or not. If they reach a mutual concensus about you being emotionally unrecipricative then they might withdraw to avoid being hurt further. A sense of being valued in some form is a nessisary portion of friendship for most people. They will project that assumption of being valued and emotionally cared for onto you by default if you act like a friend because that is something they do when they act that way and even if they logically know it isn’t reciprocated they might not give up on you if you show effort to keep them in your life. Someone who acts like a friend but never did show signs of caring is more often than not going to be falsely attributed as once caring but withdrawing that care for a reason, which is in some relationship circumstances is inflicted as a punishment. So even if it’s not your intention people might interpret your behaviour not as rude but as a deliberate act of cruelty.
If you want them to stick around then letting them know that you like the experience of them as people in some way is key. Like if you find them more entertaining than most or recognize their good qualities then letting them know is what is going to keep them around.
What nobody tells you is that people before the age of 25 tend to make closer relationships where they emotionally risk more and become closer faster. Generally speaking it is more difficult to make as dedicated friends as an older adult as people are less likely to latch and a lot of people when they fail to make these types of high risk close friendships later in life interpret themselves as deficient as a person. You are in the prime age of emotionally high risk but high reward friendships. That does mean that the way these friendships resolve might become formative to the people around you as you might be one of the first non-safe relationships they have as they have not built adequate defenses. Wounds suffered in youth have an outsized effect and if things go particularly south without adequate explanation they may particularly remember you long term as a source of personal anguish.
Remember this, vulnerability is a bonding behaviour, your vulnerability just works a lot different than other people’s. People might reject you if they can’t figure out how to interface with your type of vulnerability but some will genuinely recognize it as you risking something because you ultimately value them not being hurt over their usefulness and function in your life. There are a lot of people out there with empathy above and beyond the median… But I would recommend therapy for lessons on how to navigate relationships in a non-standard way.