Fading out

I have the urge to explain myself, but I don't think the recipient would find it edifying. So I'm unloading the reasons why here. I'm not being very transparent so perhaps I should explain.

A few years ago I made a friend - we initially met online but live close to each other and ending up seeing each other as friends in real life. We helped each other out.

Over the last year or so, however, I've found that it's not a friendship that makes me particularly happy - not because she's not nice or that she's not kind, but it doesn't really make me feel good. She often invites me to things, but it's always masses of people I don't know, never just a few, or mostly a crowd I'd met before. I'm not good in large social gatherings and she knows that: we've talked before about social awkwardness and shyness.

Bizarrely (to my eyes) she claims to find socialising difficult herself. Maybe internally it feels/is true to her, but from where I'm standing it looks like she loves to be in a social whirl of people. I can't believe she suffers the same frozen agonies that I experience.

If we do meet up 1-2-1, she always uses her phone or laptop a lot at the same time, and maybe that's old-fashioned of me, but I feel offended by it - well, not offended - but like I'm not interesting enough or fun to be around. Which may well be true.

So weighing it all up, stress vs pleasure in her company, I came to realise the former far outweighed the latter and have let things drift. It's perhaps a cowardly way out, but there's nothing to row about or confront really, just I don't feel we have much in common and that I'm there to make up the numbers rather than she really likes me.

And who needs that? I have already plenty of long-established reasons to doubt my own likeability/loveability.

But she evidently realised I've created distance and texted me recently inviting me to yet another thing with a jolly crew of campers, and asking if I was upset with her. I replied just saying that I'm rubbish at keeping in touch and there we've left it.

But the above is why.

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