How Do I Accept That My Friends Have Moved On Without Me?

There is no way to ask the question “Why don’t you like me anymore?” that will bring you peace.

Friendship can be hard. Nicole tries to make it easier. Welcome to Nicole Knows, an advice column centered on the relationships that don’t always get the most attention. 

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Dear Nicole,

I took the semester off from my professional degree due to some mental health problems. I was very, very burnt out, which triggered a pretty severe bout of depression. When I took the semester off, the friends I’d made from the previous school year faded away pretty quickly. At first I thought it was because I had moved away, and distance plus people’s own busy lives were a thing. Now, as I’ve been getting ready to return, I thought I’d try again. But my attempts at making plans to catch up were either straight-up ignored or politely declined.

I am a firm believer in owning up to personal mistakes. Although I’ve wracked my brain, I can’t think of anything that may have caused this. I find myself second-guessing everything that happened and doubting my own experiences and perceptions. No one owes you anything, of course. I am an adult and can respect people’s choices without understanding them. My question is: How do I return to classes with people I used to call my close friends and pretend like I don’t feel terrible? Coursework and being back in school are fulfilling joys in their own right, but when I think of sitting in the same classroom as them, I feel red-faced and wildly self-conscious. I don’t want to be That Girl We Were Friends With and, Boy, Let Me Tell Ya, It Was A Mistake, Plus She Cares Way Too Much About It.

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How TREMENDOUSLY upsetting! I am so sorry. Also, I am happy that you are currently in a much better frame of mind. Should you find yourself in another bout of severe depression (or should any of our readers be in that position at the current time), I recommend Captain Awkward’s truly excellent guide on “How To Tighten Up Your Game At Work When You’re Depressed,” which is aimed at people in the workplace but transfers over to school and life very handily.

Your situation is pretty common, and there are a handful of plausible explanations for it. The Occam’s Razor read of this state of affairs is that many people are made incredibly uncomfortable by mental health issues, and after a few hamfisted attempts to jolly the mentally ill person along, tend to drift towards the exits. Sometimes this is because they are selfish or cruel or thoughtless, sometimes it’s because seeing something like depression or anxiety in others is a trigger for their own mental illness and they wish to avoid it, and sometimes it’s an utterly subconscious maneuver.

I am not dismissing out of hand the idea that something in particular might have happened to create this new coldness. I have a few friends with Borderline Personality Disorder (a tremendously difficult and hugely stigmatized condition) who struggle hugely with waking up to the wreckage of their personal relationships following a rather spectacular meltdown, having genuinely forgotten that it ever occurred. It doesn’t sound like this is your situation, however, and I do not wish to add to the sense of paranoia you are feeling as you try to merge back into your coursework.

It’s also possible that, as is so often the case, your former friends are not intentionally freezing you out, and are instead simply self-absorbed and the gulf between you is the natural result of having passed a full year in separate orbits. They are different now, and you are different now, and any friendship you may find with them will be a new one, not a continuation of the old. And that’s okay, really! Friendships come and go. Someone can be an ideal friend for you in your twenties while not being great for you in your thirties. Sometimes it’s very challenging not to think of that as a failure (my husband’s best friend is still his best friend from second grade), but drifting apart can be perfectly benign.

I am also very sympathetic to your overthinking about this, as what you are experiencing feels true to my own experience of college, in that something broke at some point, beyond my awareness, and there was an ensuing rupture between myself and a group of people I thought I belonged to. Whether that happened because of my own problems (selfishness, depression, gossip) or because of the natural ebb and flow of human friendship, I am still unsure. I also still think about it all the time, and I graduated from college in 2005.

The bright note here is that school is a very brief time, and you probably would not have known these people much longer, anyway. What a marvelous opportunity to cut bait. I am not saying that you should jettison all your former relationships and move forward sunnily, but I am telling you, from a position of knowledge, that there is no way to ask the question “why don’t you like me anymore?” that will bring you peace.

Please prioritize your own mental health, now and always, and return to your classwork as though you just piloted in from another planet. Think of it as a clean slate and not a scorched earth, to the extent you are able. Other people spend so little time thinking about us, which is a lesson I learn more fully every subsequent year of my life, and truly understanding that is the key to not being red-faced at your desk. This is always good to remember about people who have dumped you, but it’s also true for the rank-and-file. I remember every single embarrassing thing I have ever done, but if you asked me to recall embarrassing things I have witnessed, I would be hard-pressed to do so. Humans can be deliciously self-absorbed, and, in this case, it may be a feature and not a bug. I wish you all the very best.

Nicole