The Advice Column II

352

Advice Request
This person feels that their friends are annoying them and wants to end their friendship but is feeling guilty about it.

Answered Submission
Hello there!

Before I proceed with anything, I want to praise you for still respecting your friend’s decision in identifying as ‘they/them’ and refering to them as that pronoun, even behind their back.

I know you can’t help but feel guilty. It might be because you feel bad for hating them when you’ve been friends for some time. But from how I see it, it’s not wrong to feel that way when they haven't been a nice friend to you for quite a while. It's tiring to be with someone who's toxic. Even when you’ve tried to sit down to talk with them, they wouldn't have a conversation back with you. Don’t feel guilty over things that happened with their old friends because it’s not you who pushed the old friends to leave them. That's their own fault.

My advice would be for you to make new friends. It seems to me that you’ve tried to make your friend change, but they do not seem to want to. We can try to do a lot of things to change someone, but a person can only change when they decide to change. Being in a toxic relationship will only affect you negatively in the end, and at the end of the day, we have to take care of ourselves first.

You’ve mentioned that you have social anxiety, and you don’t want to drop your friends because it only ends up making you miserable. From how I see things right now, being with them also makes you feel miserable. The best thing to do then is to leave them. As I said before: at the end of the day, we have to take care of our own mental health first.

You want to make new friends, but your anxiety has been holding you back. I know it’s scary, and I know it gets pretty nerve-wracking. So before making new friends, I suggest that you focus on yourself. Try to make yourself feel comfortable with being you. Take up a hobby, or spend more time doing something that you like so that you can get to know yourself more. This way, you can find something that makes you feel proud of being you or make you feel great about yourself.

However, if you feel like you cannot do those things by yourself, you might want to meet with a therapist or your school counsellor so they can help you with your social anxiety.

There are a lot of tips on making friends, and according to an article that I’ve read by a social anxiety disorder expert named Cuncic, to make friends, you have to find places to make friends. If you join a club, it could be at that club, and if you have a job, it could be friends at that job. To read more of the article that Cuncic had written, here’s the link:

https://www.verywell.com/how-to-make-friends-3024380

I personally think the article has some great points that correlate to your current situation.

I surely hope this will help you a lot, and I wish you the best of luck in life.

With love,

The Advice Column Team