So I have depression and anxiety. My friend (I’ll call her Phoebe) and I met in college and she introduced me to my first group of friends after a long time being lonely.
The thing is in this group there’s this very conflictive girl who I love (I’ll call her Janice) but I’m trying to distance myself from slowly. In a span of two or three weeks I had two pretty bad fights with Janice.
She’s very childish and possessive and controlling and after being in a shit ton of toxic relationships and doing therapy, I’ve learned not to stand for that and set my boundaries. But as she’s always been given control in the group, she doesn’t like when someone doesn’t do as she wants.
I had a very bad fight with Janice in the group chat for some stupid shit and she unwarrantedly called me all sorts of names even after I tried to be as calm as possible when sharing my posture and I just snapped.
After a long time bottling up my emotions, this did it. So I privately chatted with Phoebe and told her I was very depressed and emotionally exhausted and tired of people in general and just wanted to die. Not just because of Janice, it’s just that everything had exploded.
I turned off every app’s notifications possible and went to sleep. I stayed in bed for 3 days without my phone until I had to go back to social life because of some group homework for college.
I had 2 messages from Phoebe:
One, the morning after the whole ordeal saying: hey, how are you feeling this morning?
The other one, a day after: hey, I haven’t heard from you, let me know WHEN YOU CAN OR WANT TO if you’re okay.
As soon as I see them I answer. But she didn’t answer back.
So today I insisted and she answered that she didn’t answer because she was upset because I hadn’t messaged her to let her know I was okay and she was worried. I was dumbfounded.
I proceeded apologize for worrying her and telling her how my depression works, what happened this time and how I thought it was unfair for her to punish me for something that literally rules my life some seasons and I can’t control. I told her that this isn’t the first time this happens during our friendship and will certainly not be the last. I offered her my mum’s phone number so she can ask her when this happens again. She never answered.
Now I want to make myself a little ball and stay in bed without contacting humans ever again. It’s very tiring.
What should I do?
TLDR: I had a fight with one of my friends
in a group, I got extremely depressed and vented to my other friend, then stayed in bed for days, disappeared from social media and when I reappeared she got mad I didn’t let her know I was fine. Now I don’t know what to do.
2 comments
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I would give her some space. Given some time to cool down things might improve.
As someone who also deals with bouts of depression I’ve learned that when I have venting sessions like that with friends, giving them a heads up goes a long way. Telling someone you want to die and then dropping off the face of the earth can be really scary for the person on the receiving end. Something as simple as saying “I need some space and am going to disconnect for a few days” is usually what I do.
Openly communicating your intentions can be difficult and feel unnecessary, but when it comes to talking about wanting to die it’s really important to try to convey you’re venting and not really in need of being talked off a ledge.