Why I don't keep in touch

Recently I've become horrible at keeping in touch with my friends. I haven't been an every-day-phone-call kind of girl since high school, but lately I've gone months without contacting a few friends. It's weird, because they're interesting people, there's no bad blood between us, and I truly care about them. Yet I find it hard to pick up the phone or shoot off an e-mail. I know it's partly guilt because it's been so long, and I don't know what to say ("sorry, I was abducted by aliens"). It's also because my life has been in something of a rut these last few months, and I don't want to drag anyone else down, nor do I feel I have an abundance of interesting tidbits to offer.

I'm also not the most social person unless I'm prodded. In college, I was forced to interact with people. One day two concerned friends showed up at my dorm room after I'd been MIA in the cafeteria. (Unfortunately, I was in the middle of having phone sex when they started pounding on the door.)

Furthermore, my friends are widely dispersed, so it's difficult to see them or get any two of them in the same place at once. (Actually, only two of them have ever met each other, and they don't get along well.) Here are the locations of my six closest friends. The closest is two hours away. (Sorry Canadians, I was too lazy to find a map with provincial boundaries. Those markers are supposed to be Calgary and Vancouver.)



Anyway, whine whine whine, I need to make some friends nearby, and I need to keep in touch with the diaspora.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's a lot easier to keep the friends you already have than to make new ones (speaking real, true friendships).

It's surprising how easy it is to be self-absorbed at this stage in your life. You'd think 18-23 [or so] would be the "me me me" years, but it seems to just escalate. I'm still waiting for it to peak, and I'm 36. Existentially, it's a real bitch...ain't it?