Oh yeah, the majority of my friendships have ended through just losing touch and me being hesitant to make the first move to reach back out. But at the risk of being hypocritical, just remember the proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.”

For a time I felt like that. There was this girl with I had been friends with for about a decade. She had been there through my best and worst and put up with my shit. Then I got worse, kinda pushed her away, and we stopped talking. For a while I felt like I missed her (in reality I had feeling for her), but with some time I realized we also grew apart because we grew into different people, and that’s fine. I missed the feeling, not the person, and the feeling likely won’t come back.

I’m gonna be honest I’ve lost friends because of reaching out.

At least 5 friends I had before I stopped talking because I simply was not in a good mental state to keep using social media/messaging daily, I was in a different country, and none of us had started a conversation.

I felt overwhelmed about it as well. Sometimes I even felt more nervous about reaching out than going to a job interview.

As soon as I sent the text asking how they had been, the first text I received was “You think you can just pick up the phone and text again like nothing happened? You never text”

They didn’t even want to know how I was doing. I was taken aback but I immediately asked “I’m sorry I couldn’t reach out before, but, why did you never text either?” And they just blocked me.

The good thing I can take from this is that I think actual friends would be happy that their friends reached out.

I think about contacting my HS best friend all the fucking time. Never have tho. I was an awful friend after we left school tbh, I was never the one reaching out first.

Beyond the fear of rejection, the biggest thing stopping me is I still have nothing to offer as a friend. I never reached out because I never have anything I want to talk about, and I don’t have anything to talk about because I don’t do anything. I can barely afford gas to leave the house, let alone interesting things to do once I’m out. Catching up on what I’ve been up to would seriously take like 30 minutes, and like half of that would be explaining all the deaths in my family in the last few years

I did, recently, with a couple of high school buddies.

One, I left a voice mail, they never returned the call.

The other, I got in contact, I went to visit them, we had some drinks, dinner, chatted a lot, it was great. We have continued to be in contact since.

Overall, I’d say it was absolutely worth it.

A friend and former coworker of mine went dark about a year ago. We both got laid off from a restaurant in Portland, Or during the pandemic. He elected to use his unemployment money to get super addicted to fentanyl. Once all the unemployment money and government eviction protections ran out he went out on the streets and disappeared.

Flash forward to last week, another friend and I were drinking on the sidewalk in front of a bar. Our old friend happened to walk by. Neither of us recognized him at first, he had become straight stereotypical homeless guy. All scabby and hauling a cart of stolen goods. We made contact with him and figured out where he was staying at a “safe rest village” not far away. I walked back there with him and met a few of his new crew, they all smoked fent and passed out in front of me. Homeless friend and I were both from the same hometown and I’ve known his family have been trying to get a hold of him for months, so I arranged a time to meet with him the next day so he could use my phone and get some shit together.

He didn’t show up to the meeting, so I walked down to the SRV. Security at the SRV doesn’t let outsiders in and won’t say the names of anyone inside, I paid a guy walking in to go grab my buddy. After waiting about 45 minutes he finally rolled out. I walked with him down to the needle exchange and caught up with his life more. Him and his friends generally buy fentanyl for $1 a pill. It works on a barter system a lot of the time, trading bikes and power tools straight for pills. After he picked up his supplies for the day he said he needed to pick up something back at the village and would meet me outside in a couple minutes. Never came back out.

I’ll try again next week.