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.”

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.

Think about the reasons behind your feelings. If it is shyness and some anxiety around the social aspect of it, that’s one thing. If there is a deeper reason why you might feel uncomfortable with these people or why they might reject you, that’s something else to acknowledge. Good luck.

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

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.

I think about doing this all the time and I have the exact same fear.

The friends I knew managed to do so much with their lives over the years. By comparison, I feel like I’m stuck in the exact same place I was in years ago.

Whenever I think about reaching out, I think about that moment. The one where they ask how I’ve been doing or what I’ve been up to.

I don’t even know where I’d start or what I’d say. Just the thought of it alone is enough to make me extremely anxious.

I think I’d rather eat actual dirt than face the embarrassment of letting them see how I turned out.

I just reconnected with a friend yesterday afternoon. We ended up talking for two hours and are making plans to meet in a few weeks. The ‘sorry-we-lost-touch’ part was brushed aside. It felt just like good old times again.

Try sending a text. Maybe your friend misses you too.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I lost touch with all my ‘friends’ from University. They all seemed to stay together as a group after graduation, but I always felt sort of unwelcome. I thought about trying to reconnect recently, but the only thing that actually connects me to those people was a shared time and space well over a decade ago. Apply this to everyone I ever knew as a friend - most of the time the relationship was based on proximity and necessity alone. I’m romanticising old relationships (like an ex), when in reality we’ve all lived different lives and grown in different ways and likely no longer align with each other.

Truly right now, I have no friends. Just connections to people I no longer meaningfully identify with. I want to go out and make friends, but I don’t know how to. And I want those friendships to be deep and meaningful, but I’m not sure how I’d find that. I’ve made a sort of peace with that - friendship will come, when it’s the right person and the right time. I don’t want to force it.

I’m old enough that I graduated high school before social media became a thing. My high school friends and I kept in touch via landline phone and ICQ. ICQ died and people moved so I have no way to find a lot of them again, especially the ones whose names are so generic I can’t find them on social media.

I also have some friends I lost contact with because they decided to ghost me after I experienced a major trauma. We were young and I’m sure they didn’t know what to say, were going through their own stuff, etc etc, but it was still very hurtful that they just vanished on me and never bothered to reach out even though they knew what had happened. It’s been years and I’m not angry at them anymore but I have zero interest in being friends with them.

Part of the reason – and part of the reason that I don’t try harder to find people I was friends with when I was younger – is that I genuinely feel like I’m a different person now than I was before some of that stuff happened, both because I experienced a really life-altering traumatic thing and because I just got older. The person who was friends with those people doesn’t even exist anymore. I’d basically have to start those relationships over from scratch. I’m curious how they’re doing and I hope they’re well but I don’t really want to reconnect.

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 don’t do much. Most of them are friends from when I was a kid but in a weird way I worry they would judge me in a disappointed kind of way with how my life is going.

Most of them have kids, spouses, or careers at this point so I don’t know if they would be willing or able to make the time

Oh absolutely

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.

There are a few people, definitely, that I’ve thought about reaching out to. I have them on Facebook, could literally just send them a text at any moment.

The problem is twofold: the first; crippling anxiety. I worry that I’d be an inconvenience to them, or worsen their day for my having contacted them. I worry that maybe they never liked me in the first place - after all, they never reached out either.

The second issue is a general loss of social skills. The pandemic turned me into a hermit, and even though I’ve been in Uni both before the pandemic and after, my social skills have never recovered. I can’t just join a group like other people do. I don’t get on with people super easily in group settings; I’m better in one-on-one situations.

Certainly, this may just be anxiety. But it’s that what if question that stops me from reaching out.

Yep, it’s been so long that I feel awkward about reaching out, which makes me delay and avoid reaching out, which makes it even longer since we last talked, which just makes me even more awkward about reaching out. It’s a vicious circle…