Published on 12, July, 2020
How do you feel about doing this and if others do it to you?
E.g. you've not heard from a close friend in a while. You begin to feel a bit insecure and you just want to check in on them to see how they are, and whether or not they're angry with you. Or if they're happy with being your friend.
I used to do it once in a blue moon, not regularly or anything, but I'd still hate myself every single time. I feel like I'm being difficult and irritating. I would worry that at some point, someone will flip out at me - "I'm just busy, I haven't got the time to chat" in a way that might leave me feeling they hate me for asking.
Even though I know that if someone approached me in the same way, I'd be honest with them and I wouldn't think bad of them. If anything, I'd welcome the fact they care that much.
That said, I can be quite cynical.
One of the reasons I’m so poor at keeping friends is that I hesitate to reach out to them because I feel like I’ll just be bothering them and they don’t really want to hear from me anyway - if they did they would call or text me.
I realise this is self defeating.
I went too far the other way and reached out far too much, pushing them away as a result.
Ideally I'd have had a balance of the two. The problem is while I used to communicate with people a lot, we didn't get to the root of a lot of things and I dodged the more vulnerable conversations. I'll regret that forever.