Selfcare and losing people because of it

I don’t know if I am the only one.. Let me share you my current struggle and maybe I can feel like I am not a bad person. I have a lot going on right now when it comes to relationships. Most of all I mean the type of family and friends relationships. During my coaching I finally started to understand what it meant to take care of yourself, feel your needs and act on them. The more I started to do that, the more I started to feel resistance from my girl friends back then. Every time I felt sick or tired or just not in the mood to go out (because I was in a post-Pfeiffer’s disease period recovering and that also had its effects on my mood) I decided I wouldn’t keep on saying ‘yes’ on every proposal anymore. I wanted to remain a balance that was, to me at least, healthy. My friends decided it wasn’t enough. They wanted more time with me and wanted me to hang out more. Some might say you can see that as a compliment, that they like you so much that they want to see you more often, but I felt neglected in my needs and threatened. ”If you don’t hang out with us at the moments we ask you to then where is this friendship even going” was the vibe I got from them. And my growing self-love voice told me at that moment to not give in on people who want so much attention and energy from you. Because it means that they feel like THEIR needs are more important than yours. In other words, they don’t respect you and your boundaries and as a consequence get mad because you proceed to set those boundaries. Maybe it is because before the coaching, we were already friends for years, and my health condition was a lot different. I more often felt like going out AND I wasn’t the strong, self-caring (not all the time though) person that I am now. I said yes to hanging out to avoid fights or discussions, I made sure to text them in periods where we wouldn’t be able to meet up because I wanted to be that good friend and I wanted to be loved and needed that reassurance from other people very much (which I later learnt isn’t healthy at all). That wouldn’t even have been so bad if they did all that for me too, but they didn’t. I was and have always been the giver in a relationship. Other people take – my time, energy, love, advice… – feed theirselves with it and then run away. They probably don’t recognize me anymore now that I am, ironically, more becoming my true self and staying true to myself. It is also pretty hurtful to see that they don’t even feel like TRYING to understand what is going on with me. They are simply not interested in that, only in having me as an extra presence when they’re going partying and escaping their soon to be grown up lives. If they were real friends, really invested in me as a person and truly concerned, they would have asked me: “Hey, we have noticed you don’t meet up with us as much as you used to.. Is something going on?”. Eventually, I skipped the part of waiting for that and I just straight up told them that I was experiencing troubling health problems and that it was very frustrating to me to have to stay at home and in bed (because ofcourse one part of me wanted to rest and take care of myself but I also wanted to paint the town red just like other students do). They simply replied that they understood and that was the end of it. I only heard things from them if I did go out with them and even after a few weeks of not being able to meet up, I felt they were clinging together as a ”us against you” kind of thing. It was a very excluding vibe and I did not like where it was going. So one night, I blew up, which was my own fault. I should have talked about it sooner, that I was feeling excluded but I didn’t because at first I thought it was gonna go away when we would hang out more. But it didn’t, so I flipped and I got insanely mad (during one of our hangouts where they were being extremely childish and excluding). And that was a turnpoint where it was very easy for them to make me the bad guy. And ofcourse the sentence: ”You have no right to feel mad about being excluded because you were never there” came out. That was actually proof that they didn’t understand my situation and the actual need to rest. They felt like it was my choice and that it is now my own fault that I am not included as much (while I might have been away for a month TOPS). Well, what do you do with friends who have been in a hospital for example? Who also go through sickness, but more acute and intense than me. Just because my Pfeiffer’s disease isn’t as obvious as another physical disease doesn’t mean that I am talking shit or exaggerating. I shouldn’t even have to defend myself towards my friends, they should just believe me and accept me when I am healthy enough to go out again, or even better, COME VISIT ME. But they didn’t. And actually our friendship already should have stopped there, because a few weeks later I even get accused of not texting them enough during my busiest weeks of the year, still having health problems, and not being invested in a break up from my friend who caused and WANTED the break up herself. Even if I did spend one thought about that during those busy weeks (let me illustrate busy: being at the hospital for my internship from 8 AM till 7 AM working overtime to prepare therapies, writing essays, barely eating, getting home at 8 and keep on working till midnight to do it all over again for the next couple of weeks) I would have probably been more concerned about that mutual friend of ours she broke up with because he was at that moment shattered with heartbreak. When I am typing this out I only realize just how toxic that friendship was? Not respecting one’s boundaries, not being interested in anothers life or expecting them to most of all ask about your life without anything in return… Demanding your daily attention and energy while you are trying to graduate and make something of your life. Can you really blame a friend for that? I even said sorry for not asking how she was doing as much as she wanted. I should have never done that. I should’ve just said fuck you right to her face, trying to minimalize what I went through with my disease and with that internship. Even though I am very conscious about self-care and implementing those values, I still feel a lot of guilt for not being the person those people want me to be: my ”friends” (luckily not all of them are like that). Also my grandmother said some really hurtful things about me. She constantly compares me to my sister who is older, already working and still very much has to learn to say no to protect herself. Our grandmother is bipolar and asks a lot of attention. She calls daily and wants us to visit daily and she barely understand what it means to study in another city on the other side of the country. So now that I have exams for the whole month, she doesn’t understand what that means. She keeps on texting me, and when I see her she complains about me not visiting enough. It drives me mad because I try so hard to keep everyone happy, but today I snapped. I told her that I am not like my sister and that I litteraly don’t have the time to come more often. I don’t have a car for instance so I can’t come and visit whenever even when I want to. I am litteraly too busy and preoccupying myself with graduating. Not to mention I still visit her 2 days per week or so. It seems like it is never enough for her and that she also doesn’t – partially because of her sickness – respect my boundaries and does not believe me when I say I am busy. I know she”ll come around and that she will understand that in a month, I will have all of the time in the world. But these situations that I just explained altogether make me feel like I am losing people just by setting boundaries and taking care of myself. And because I am still not where I should be, as a consequence I feel guilt and think that they are probably the ones who are right and that I should change what I am doing. I’m just really in a conflict with myself trying to be who others want me to be and just being myself.