I relate to a lot of these feelings. Relationships are hard and increasingly precious over time, and it sucks when they have to change. Hope you're doing better over time too

I mean, it's bullshit.

It is harder, but that's not the same as impossible.

It is, however, true that you can't make old friends. You have to luck into that. To get an old friend, you have to get a new one and do the work. You have to figure out if that work is worth it at some point as well.

Thing is, while all relationships need to be balanced, they don't have to be totally equal. It doesn't have to be 1:1 on every specific aspect. As an example, you might be the one that has to reach out more often, but they might be the sort to go the extra mile when they're available. You might do more emotional support, they might do more activity based support. All that really matters is that a given friend be active in the friendship, and that both have needs being met. If won't ever be the case that a given friend can meet every need because nobody can perfectly meet another's needs that way.

It is also much harder to maintain a friendship when one person or the other moves. Believe it or not, really deep and meaningful relationships can form long distance. It's when the people involved have built their relationship on in-person things that then disappear that you run into trouble. There's a lot to be said for physical presence in relationships, and losing that aspect is very, very difficult to recover from. It's possible, just way harder.

But when you build long distance, you start without those assumptions, so the lack of physical presence means less. Mind you, you can run into trouble if/when things transition to an in person interaction because a different set of assumptions is in place that can be disrupted, but that's tangential to what's bothering you currently.

You're right though; if a friend can't at least give support in bad times, are they really a friend? That is part of the point of social relationships, that there's a tacit understanding of mutual assistance, regardless of what form that takes. If one party isn't carrying that basic idea, then balance breaks entirely.

So how is it possible that I can feel so awful all the time and still drag myself to go out and have fun even though I’m at a bar alone. I can do it. It’s not hard. Just go out and get a drink and stand there and be ok.

Numerous types of mental illnesses make this a lot more difficult do to for some people than others. You may feel like crap but you're not actively suffering deep depression. Deep depression literally makes it very, very physically difficult to drag yourself out of your place to be social. So for some people, it actually is incredibly hard.

I cannot be special, that’s against the rule that everybody is special therefore nobody’s special therefore I cannot be special.

That's some seriously circular logic going on here. It's not that "everybody is special" so much as everybody is unique. That doesn't make them special or good or anything, it just means every individual is fundamentally different from all the rest and handles interpersonal situations differently than all the rest. That's just basic social situational understanding, that different people respond differently to the same stimuli.

Just some food for thought, maybe people are going through different struggles than yourself and you should perhaps try to give them a little more grace.

Final thought, maybe pushing away friends because they're not fulfilling your demands of them enough and then complaining about not having any friends after that is kind of an unhealthy way of coping with these feelings. I have close friends that there have been stretches in life where we fell out of touch, but when push came to shove they were there for me, even if we hadn't spoken in years. Just because people are going through some shit and maybe not as available as they once were doesn't necessarily mean they don't care.

Join a club.

Find something that interests you and find other people who do it.

Running, walking, baking, knitting, skydiving, scuba diving, theater.

There's got to be something you like to do. Join the club and get active in it.