I may cover some mental/emotional struggles and heavy topics (that might be uncomfortable to some people) on this page, so consider yourself warned.
For privacy, I will never include anyone's real name here, only pseudonyms I've created.
Hello world lol. I honestly have no clue how to start this but I'm gonna try.
So I have this friend who really struggles socially. I've been friends with her for at least ten years and noticed that her social life has steadily diminished since. I think she could be undiagnosed autistic but it doesn't really matter. We were in different grades, so as little kids, we only really were able to talk to each other on the bus, but then she stopped taking the bus to school and so did I. There was a brief period of time when we didn't hang at all. About two or three years ago, we had some classes together and I would sit by her at lunch. It was fun for a while but our conversations got really boring and repetitive. I distanced myself from her last spring and I kinda acted like a jerk with the idea that she would take a hint and put our friendship on another hiatus.
But now I have a class with her again and I've started talking to her. She just seems really lonely. She's not mad that I tried to get away from her, just hurt. I don't know what to do though because I care about her and I hate seeing her so isolated, but I don't think I like hanging out with her anymore. I told her that I was thinking about having a birthday party in a couple weeks and that I would invite her once I got the logistics planned. But now that I've thought about it a little bit, I'm not sure. Most of my friends don't know anything about her, so what if it's really awkward?
Idk. I'm just way overthinking this. I'm not going to uninvite her, but I wanna at least figure out how I should act. I hope that she'll make friends with one of my friends so that at least I won't have to worry about her social life as much. I genuinely do care about her, I just don't wanna feel responsible for her socially.
—Cyanic