My friend group from high school and I have all been back in our hometown from college for the past month and a half. In that month and a half, they have not reached out to me ONCE, while actively hanging out with each other almost every night. This really hurt my feelings.
I stopped texting them once I realize I’m the one who starts all our conversations, and my texts barely go answered.
This made me realize they clearly don’t want me in their lives anymore if they’re hanging out every night without me knowing I’m literally a 5 minute drive away from them. So, I blocked their numbers and left our group chat.
One of our mutual friends just texted me and said what I did to them was “messed up,” and that the entire group is really upset.
But why do they suddenly care now after a month and a half of radio silence? If they were truly my friends, it shouldn’t have taken me doing such drastic actions for them to notice I exist.
The same mutual friend is encouraging me to apologize, but I have no desire to do that. I don’t think I owe this friend group any explanation after how they’ve deliberately left me out the past month, but I just want some other perspectives on this situation.
Update: I felt guilty last night, so I unblocked and texted them asking to talk. However, they’ve ignored that message, so I really don’t understand what they want from me. I guess I tried to give them a second chance, and they didn’t want it.
4 comments
Fuck those guys OP 🗿. Do you! Do not waste anymore time on that toxic waste ☠️
Could there be a misunderstanding? Last thing you want to do is shut them out completely without knowing the full story. Maybe there’s a certain behavior of yours that they can’t stand.
It is easy to unite against a dislike of someone in the group. Normally its one or two people who are well respected in the group that start the thought of someone being outcast from the group. It was quite immature of them or really the mutual friend to not come out sooner about why they were ignoring you. I would also cut off the mutual friend since it does sound like they are on the groups side. It can be as polite as “my feelings were hurt by this group, i am not apologizing, please do not contact me any further”
Its really hard to accept that people you thought were your friends will not be in your life anymore. Take some time for soul searching your interests, build up your skills and in the future you can participate in local community groups. Sounds like you’re pretty young and just know there are people out there in the future that will actively share the same interests and values who will want to be in your life. It might be a smaller group of a few really good friends but at the end of the day that is all you need.
So I wanna point out – everything that you did, and all of the information on which you based your decisions, was entirely conclusions that you drew and acted on alone without any extra information from these other people.
Did you ask them what’s up? Because while I understand feeling put out, if not being texted is enough for you to “realize they clearly don’t want me in their lives anymore” instead of ask them “So, I feel like I start a lot of the conversations – what’s up with that?” then I would see more self-work in your future.
I’ve had great experience lately with Values Assessments; pausing at the start of the day for meditation and coffee while I figure out my short and long term goals. I’ve never had friendship as a goal, because the friendship part of things is a means to an end and not an end in itself – one does not become friends with a person and get a You Win screen with a fade to black after credits. There’s always the Ever After to consider beyond the Happily.
So. From their perspective, it could appear that you dropped off the face of the earth sight unseen.
You don’t owe them an apology. Your feelings are as valid as they feel – you are experiencing them, they are real, they are having an impact on you *but they are not You.* Your feelings are *not* you.
Additionally, you have control over You. Mindreading, Future-seeing… these things are tricks we use to fool ourselves into feeling comfortable. We don’t know what other people are thinking without communicating with them. We just don’t. We can make educated guesses and suppositions, but *we do not know* and *cannot know*. We can train our reactions, and we can control our responses and actions, but only our own.
As such, did your friends know how put out you were over the last several weeks that you completely dropped contact with them? Or are you expecting them to read your mind as well?
I’ve found tenets of DBT to be very helpful in moderating my interpretations of the events around me, and it’s helped keep me grounded in the known reality of a situation, instead of the assumed catastrophe.
ETA: I did notice some of your other posts as well, OP. So far as calming down, what I might suggest are TIPP skills from DBT. Temperature –Intense Exercise –Paced breathing and – Paired muscle relaxation. [worksheet](https://in.nau.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/202/TIP-Skills.pdf)