Friends.

I have noticed recently that since I have become a bit mentally interesting again my friends seem to have disappeared. I know I should make more of an effort but there are a couple of friends that I am quite hurt by.

First off - Annie

She is supposed to be my best friend. I first met her about 6 years ago while working for a bank in it's call centre. We became really close and used to go out together all the time. She was my slightly mad but in a fun way, you know the kinda dippy blonde who needed looking after friend. But at the same time she was highly intelligent and great at giving advice and making you feel better. She knew about my problems when they first kicked off in 2006. She knew about the self harm also but not the extent of it. She has always been a bit unreliable and a pain to get hold of as she puts her whole self in to her job as a teacher. She is a fun person to be around and I love her to bits. But. I am the one who always makes contact. Well tries to. She never answers her phone, she never replies to texts and is a pain to get hold of. I last saw her at the end of January. We went out for dinner and I told her a bit about what had been going on and nearly started crying in the restaurant. I have not heard from her since. I have tried calling numerous times and her phone now appears to always be off. I do worry about her. But at the same time I wonder if it's something I have done. If she just doesn't want to be friends as I am screwed up and I am draining. She will probably get in contact with me in the next couple of months probably over the Easter holidays and suggest meeting up. I hope so anyway. I really miss her.

Jemima -

Met her in 2004 at uni. In all honesty I didn't like her at first. I found her really hard work. She is neurotic, she is an attention seeker. She makes you feel bad for things you shouldn't feel bad for. But I put up with her and as I don't just cut people out my life I left her there. Over the summer we saw quite a bit of each other. I was there for her when her bloke dumped her. I warned her it was coming. I told her she was treating him like crap and that she couldn't expect him to spend all his free time with her. He needed his own space also. When he broke up with her she went a bit odd. First off she ran off to her Dad's.

They have a strange relationship. He abandoned her when she was a baby and only got to know him when she was 15 or so. To me it seems as though he wants to buy her love by buying her things for the house etc. They had a massive falling out not long ago when she went on holiday with him. She decided she wasn't enjoying herself and was going to come home early. Bit of a kick in the teeth to her Dad really when he had paid for her to go with him, Anyway, she went running to him. She was in such a state that her Dad wouldn't leave her alone and she then went to her Gran's and her Mum's. She got signed off work for about a month over it. Me and my other friend kept saying to her that she was doing the wrong thing by being off work. I had gone through it myself from a much longer relationship where we lived together etc only a few months previous and I found the best distraction was work and threw myself in to it.

Anyway, she would just not listen to anything anyone was saying to her. She would call me up really late at night crying and being hysterical and I would talk to her offer her advice but she would never listen. It drove me mad. One day she called me saying she had lined up her pills she takes (they are anti-convulsants for night terrors) and she said she wanted to take them. I asked her how many she had and she said about 9. I just said to her do what you want, it won't work, all it will do is make you fall asleep for a while and then have a hang over. I stopped pandering to her. I couldn't hack it anymore. I got firm. This was in the hope she would stop asking me for advice every minute of every hour. I suppose it would be around this time that I started to have issues again also. My plans with her didn't work and then I used to get "GP, you always tell me how it is, what do you think". So being honest didn't actually pay off either. In the end she seemed to get sorted out. It was going back to work that helped. Funny that isn't it? Fair enough if you have an ongoing condition which means you are better off work. But that was something that would heal in time and she needed distracting.

Anyhoo. I have not seen her since September. The first OD I took on the 21st September I was kinda ill in hospital. I was hooked up to heart and BP machines all the time as my heart was going really fast. The hospital were concerned about it and I was in a monitored bay of 3 beds with 1 nurse. Because I left the house in quite a hurry I wasn't sure if my back door was locked. I was getting quite stressed about it. Being as though I thought she was a friend and I knew she was off that day I called her and asked her to come and get my keys to let herself in and check the back door for me.

At first she was really reluctant to. Saying she wasn't sure if she could etc. I told her I was quite ill and I wouldn't be allowed home. She came in to the hospital and saw me hooked up to the machines. While she was there she was still saying she didn't want to as was worried about doing something wrong. While she was there the doc even came over as my BP and pulse was getting even higher. She did end up going to my house ( which is only 2 minutes from hospital) but she couldn't get in as the key is a bit dodgy. So she came back to the hospital really angry at me etc. In the end I managed to persuade the Doc to let me go for about 20mins so I could go home and do it myself. He could see that it was not good on me physically the stress it was putting me under.

I did actually say to her at the time that I was thankful she came but I was a bit disappointed at her attitude considering what I had done for her over the previous months and I was a bit upset by it.

I spoke to my other friend about all of this (a mutual uni friend) and she was so pissed off at her that she contacted her having a go at her. Jemima then contacted me saying she didn't appreciate I was saying things behind her back and that I should be really grateful to her for taking the 2 hours she spent on her day off trying to sort things. I said I was, I hadn't said anything to other friend that I hadn't said to her but I was upset with her by her attitude.

I haven't seen her since. Contact has been next to nothing. A text on her birthday and a text at Xmas. She doesn't have a clue what is going on at all. But I am not bothered. The relationship I had with her was very one sided and she was take take take. It was too much effort.

Anna -

Not seen her since 21st September. I ended up telling her quite a bit in my drunken state about self harming and how I had been feeling. She twigged I had OD'd called an ambulance and left. She does have her own issues also. But I thought friends were supposed to be there for each other. She doesn't reply to messages or emails. So I think I have been cut out of her life there. I kinda miss her though as she was a good laugh. I did bump in to her in town and she was far too thin. I am worried that her ED has come back. I feel really bad for doing anything while she was there. How I put her in that position and I feel an idiot. I have lost a good friend there.

But it's amazing how you find out who your true friends are when things go belly up. I have 3 close friends who know what is going on. They know about struggles with uni and possibility of being pulled. They don't know the extent of my self harm. But I did tell one of them about how scared I was of hospital and a bit more detail. Those guys have stuck around. They text me to see how things are and what's going on. I've got lots of other friends but they don't contact me at all. We only really talk now on nights out or events where we would all be together. It does upset me as I went to school with these guys, I have known them more than half my life. Maybe I should be the one that makes the effort but why should it always be me?

I have got other friends. But I don't tell them anything. They are good fun to go drinking with and we share similar interests but I don't tell them anything like that. They are more than acquaintances, but not quite close friends.

I know I should make more of an effort with some of my friends, but with Anna and Annie there is nothing I can do other than give up or wait. With Jem, I a not bothered. Her friendship had been a drain on me for a while. But I couldn't dump her as she had no one else. But I am quite confident she has met other people from her course now so I don't feel as bad. I suppose it came at the right time really.

Has anyone else found that friendships have changed?

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