Desperately reaching out with severe anxiety

Good evening... whomever happens to be around.

I have severe anxiety. This is not only related to writing but to everything. Reaching out to communities is terrifying. My stomach is doing things that you probably don’t want to think about.

I also have bipolar disorder, mostly manifesting as racing thoughts with severe depression.

My home situation is… not good… but that is less important for now.

I have never been published. I have never tried. I have been writing for myself for many years. I have friends who are deeply obsessed with my writing, but they are few, and then I have friends who never seem to get around to looking at it, and I do not wish to impose further upon them. To be fair, I don’t have many friends.

My therapist told me to find a forum online. I did so. After signing up, it took me two months to force myself to post something. “The first three sentences in your novel.” The first two replies I received were good. One pointed out a small error I had not noticed and had one question. The following sentences answered that question. Otherwise, they seemed to like it a lot. The other pointed out a word I could remove to improve flow and had one suggestion that did make it feel slightly better to me, so I decided to use it. They also appeared to otherwise like my work.

But the third person picked apart everything, called my first line “cliche” when another person had said “I love the first line” specifically, and had no usable advice.

But that’s the one I find myself focused on. After that, the replies stopped coming. The forum is less busy than I had hoped, so I came here.

I know all the typical advice. Focus on the good. Nothing is liked by everyone. Write for yourself. But it just feels like I’m fooling myself. I intend to post in the weekly thread… eventually. But I’d rather have some people who are more my “target audience” and write similar genres to me that I could actually become friends with, where we could exchange ideas and be diligent in helping one another and rant, of course, about pointless crap from time to time.

I will send cat pics.

So here, now I’m a child, asking if anyone wants to be friends.

Or has some advice for me that isn’t quite so obvious about how to not feel like I’m going to cry and should give up when someone dislikes something I’ve poured my heart into…

It feels like it’s all I have that could be something, and even it is nothing.

I write fantasy/romance/modern fantasy/drama/bit of sci-fi, and it can get pretty violent at times.