sunflowerbird89,

Once your experience and knowledge is broadened it cannot shrink back, it’s the way we process experiences. You have this idealized picture of the company with these 5 friends which suddenly broke into pieces by that incident. But real friendships are not ideal and also they take daily basis effort to maintain, it means, to be present on every occasion. No matter how often you see each other, when you do, to be present, pay attention to what is going on, what you or the other person is doing or saying, where is they coming from.

You probably miss the comfort of being yourself with no masks, at least that’s what I understand. Usually we have this unconditional acceptance by our parents, and we take this feeling with us during our younger friendships. The world is still small and our social experiences are still limited to having fun. But we all develop in different directions and our small differences start to notice more and more over time. Our conscious perception of the other gets more judgmental with the more experience and knowledge.
Because of that it is much easier to make new friends when younger, and much more effort to maintain adult social life.

There is a saying that before it gets easier it must get harder. So now you are in a peak age of having experiences and experiment with different social circles without necessarily investing yourself in friendships if they don’t work for you. To broaden your exposure to social circles and meet bigger variety of people. Get some disappointments, learn from them and get over them, learn to use different masks as this is also an important social skill. Not everywhere and with everybody you will be safe being yourself. This is a privilege you should save for only trusted people proven over time. Yes, Privilege.

So instead of feeling bad about yourself for not being “socially comfortable” recognize that feeling as your personal defense mechanism you need before you make sense of the situation, and that when you eventually do feel comfortable, it speaks to you that the person in front of you is good for you. For the time being.