Former friend

[mortensorchid]

I thought of a former friend I had a while ago.  We went to college together and she went down a path that I wasn't going to follow.  That is, she started doing drugs.  She used to boast about rhe fact that her teeth were rotting out of her mouth and she had no memories of anything that happened before age 11.  I said as I was still trusting in my early / mid twenties that people were good underneath it all that it didn't make her a bad person.  Unfortunately, it did.

Once I was going to see a friend in Michigan and said I would be passing through her town did she want to meet up?  She never answered so I went onto Michigan.  While there she emailed me asking if I was coming through her town soon or not, I said I never heard from her and I was in Michigan right now.  She said she should have joined me because they have great drugs in the town I was in.  It wasn't until that moment that I saw it : she cared more about drugs than she did me or others.  It was then that I cut off the relationship.  

A few months later she emailed me again and said she had grown up now and realized she was wrong to have done all that she had.  And she was on a better path in life.  I never answered her.  

For some reason today I thought of her.  I did a Google search and she seems to be alive and working.  But I didn't reach out to her, I think I needed to separate myself from her and things.  But I hope she made the changes she needed to make, I wish her well and hope she's happy...

Has anyone else ever been though things like this?  Cutting someone out from the past?  How did you feel when you did it? 

[FMW]

I think it's very normal to think of people from our past from time to time.  I ended contact with a former friend several years ago due to feeling betrayed.  It was difficult and painful at the time, and I still feel sad about it.  I took my time before doing it and have never doubted I did the right thing.  But being right doesn't always feel good.  

[Alpacalia]

I'm sorry to hear about your friend. If you don't want to be around drugs, that's okay.

I lost contact with one female best friend after 15 years of friendship, but we reconnected and things are fine now.

Hopefully your friend is safe and happy and maybe she'll choose a different path one day.

It's nice of you to think of her.

[mark clemson]

On 11/1/2022 at 7:37 PM, mortensorchid said:

Has anyone else ever been though things like this?  Cutting someone out from the past?  How did you feel when you did it? 

FWIW there were some people I knew in high school (way back in the day - this is the mid-late 1980s) who did drugs and I've checked on a few of them. One guy started doing criminal things (beyond simply personal drug use) and became "aggressively weird" in that he would deliberately do things to upset people and see their reactions. Eventually he started doing criminal things - so at that point I and several of our friends (but not all) cut contact with him. He ended up in and out of prison.

I believe he was/is either scared of the responsibilities of "real life" at some level or really doesn't know how to go about e.g. getting a job, having LT relationships, etc.  At any rate, he gets himself put in prison and as soon as he's released he does something to get himself put right back in (e.g. stealing a car and going on a drunk driving bender in it - thinks like that).

My last internet search on him (maybe 5+ years ago) only turned up a mug shot.

I felt it was necessary to cut him out as  a) I was turning corners in life, whereas he seemed to be "stuck" in a very dysfunctional "13th grade" approach to life  and  b) he was taking undue risks and didn't seem to worry too much if "friends" got dragged in to whatever messes he was creating for himself.

I also attended college in a different state and have since then moved a few times, so wherever he may be now (probably prison) it's "not here" which is good because honestly I wouldn't want to have to deal with catching up with the guy - too much risk of trouble involved with that.

[mortensorchid]

It was one of those moments when I realized I was going down a bad path and being part of a bad crowd as well.  I was saying to someone a while ago that you can find yourself in a "bad crowd".  It can and does happen so easily, and one day you wake up and say "How did this happen?! How did I get here?!"  And you either cut them or they you out of your life, and you move on with things.  

I had one or two people from the past find me that I didn't want to find me, I just block them.  I made my own mistakes in the past and I don't want to rebuild relationships with others from the past because, quite honestly, I don't need to.  That includes mostly bad relationships with bad people.  But, show me one person who hasn't had one bad relationship in the past.  So that's that. 

I do wonder sometimes if she ever thinks of me at all.  We did love each other as friends once, but everything has to come to an end and ... It came to an end. 

[Alpacalia]

It isn't always about where you are in life, but who you have by your side that matters most. Some people drain you and others provide you with food for your soul.

A female friend of mine in high school I absolutely adored and we were very close. She got into some pretty heavy drugs sadly and was just all over the place. I couldn't be around it. Not necessarily because she used, but because the lies and crap that were associated with it were just too much to handle. I cut that friendship off and I haven't spoken to her since.

It is not without drama. In your case, who knows if you continued your friendship with her, if things went bad wouldn't have happened to you if you would have kept it going? What if you kept coming in contact with it so much that you started using it yourself? 

Later in life (not a romantic partner), I navigated through it with someone very close to me who had been affected by an addiction. They did the work, and they defeated it successfully.

It's always possible to drop her a letter.

Or you can simply keep her in your thoughts and prayers. That's okay too sometimes. 

Edited November 4, 2022 by Alpacalia