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nushi · Jan 01, 2019 at 12:03 AM

Hey all

I'm really shy to seek your advice about this, & I feel so much shame, because I'm an international student in America, a PhD student nonetheless... & it seems so much shameful to not be a normal person, & have all these problems, as most of you are Americans, & I'm not! But I'll take the risk & seek your advice anyway...

I've always had severe OCD problems, especially with people... whenever I get to make friends or become close with a person, I feel so scared of losing them, & I become jealous of them not giving me attention... so I had problems with people throughout my life... this forced me to leave my family & live away in another city...

When I came to America, I thought somehow, things would become better for me... I made friends with a person, but then that person became no longer interested in our friendship... one night, I felt so much lonely & asked him to stay with me that night so we can talk, when he refused, I felt so much pain & threatened to end my life... so he cut off all communication with me, & since then, my pain of rejection & loneliness deteriorated to the degree that I ended up attempting to kill myself & got hospitalized!

Despite all of this, as I'm studying for my first year in PhD, I was able to get good grades, because I'm determined that my mental health problems & dilemmas with people don't deter me from my purpose in life, to do something good to change the world...

I resumed communication with this person, & am trying to make other friends, & become a better independent person... however, I still feel stressed, abandoned, dis-respected from him... it is very hard for me here to find other friends like him, because this is a small city, & people here are either religious people, or people who are not deep-thinkers... i made friends with that person very easily, because he was the only one who engaged in the same line of deep philosophical thinking with me, & he's a radical revolutionary like me, who defies society & its norms...

I'm not sure if I should try to apply to transfer my PhD studies to another university far away, in another state... to run away from all of this, from the memories here, from him, from everything... or is it wrong to run away? is it only weakness, not to face my own problems here, & try to build my own emotional independence & face my obsessions with him here? even though i had this same problem with many others before in my life, I always ran away, & never attempted to re-build my relationships with them...

I feel so shy to transfer to another university, as my university here has provided me with a fellowship & an assistantship. It's not a very qualified university, because the research areas of its faculty are not diverse, & the only professor who does research that closely resembles my interest, turned out to be a dictational professor, who doesn't like the student to synthesize ideas & provide criticisms of their own, & this makes me feel so much shackled in my own creativity, & increases my own depression!

So, between wanting to go to a better university, feeling shy from leaving the university after they provided me with funding, wanting to run away from that person, from the obsessions, & all that happened here... I don't know what to do?!!