It's really hard for me to write this post, because some part of me is thrown back to 7th grade when I was asked to leave a lunch table group. 12-year-olds can be mean.
There are about 4-5 girls that I spent a lot of time with (happy hour, dinners, etc.) from 2010-2011. I basically got dropped by them last fall for no obvious reason. I tried to stay in touch and keep the friendship alive, but any emails/texts/calls were ignored. When I asked one of the girls who still talks to me what was going on, her response was "Oh, everyone's been busy." Fair enough. But then I started getting excluded from events, and the "busy" excuse fell apart.
It started with one girl's birthday party at a bar -- I wasn't invited, even when I asked her what was going on -- and then throughout the fall, I was left out of everything. One girl who had moved out of town came back for a weekend and they threw a party... and left me out. Any subsequent plans they made didn't include me. It's literally been over a year since I've seen two of them. It was to the point of where I had to hide them from my
Facebook news feed because it felt like a knife in my back every time
they posted a group photo of them being out and having fun without me.
I know part of is probably due to my hobby-that-takes-all-my-time and the many times in the past where I've said, "I can't, I have practice after work." As stupid as this sounds, I feel like they stopped including me because I wasn't cool enough for them... but odds are, they got tired of me declining invitations because of my double life. But it doesn't make things hurt any less.
The realist in me says to give up. The optimist in me wants to try and salvage SOMETHING, because I'm still friends with at least two of the girls, and it's awkward because they know I feel like I've been shunned. (That doesn't help, either -- feeling depressed and awful about life in general doesn't give off a good vibe.)
I know this makes them sound like they're bad people, but they're not. They were some of the nicest girls I've met, and I really think they just got sick of me being AWOL all the time. :-/
It's one of the shittiest feelings in the world to feel like you've been voted off the island. This happened to me with my college friends - for no reason - and after months - maybe even a year - of me trying to rekindle something and get to the bottom of things, I figured out, if I can't even come up with something I may have done, then there's nothing I could have possibly done to warrant feeling like an absolute nothing. I deleted all of them from my facebook - it was glorious. Chances are, you didn't do anything and real friends will understand you have other things going on. So sorry - that's not a good feeling.
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