Ending friendships

Sometimes I go through periods of wanting to shut myself off from other humans. I don't want to engage in conversations; I just want to be alone. This is very easy for me as I don't have many relationships anyway. At work I have the option to chat with colleagues or keep my head down. I can invite others to join me at lunch or wait until others have eaten and take myself off to sit alone in the staff room.

As you may know, I have very few friends. I find it really hard to make friends. Usually I can act normal enough to pass myself in general conversation for a short time but I find myself freaking out at the prospect of people getting emotionally close to me. I think people don't tend to want to get close to me because I am slightly weird and hard to read. People probably find that off putting. I tend to hold people at a distance anyway and I think this is because I'm trying to protect myself from the inevitable hurt that comes from relationships.

I made friends with Pou when we both worked together in my old job. I had always liked her, possibly because like me she is not originally from Northern Ireland and was a bit of a cultural misfit in our very specific workplace. I think I could see she was a bit different from most people too and this made me warm to her because of my being different. I now feel pretty much convinced that her being slightly different is much more than just quirks. I will come to that though.

Shortly after we started meeting up outside of work as friends, I went on sick leave because my depression and dissociation was so bad I couldn't function. We continued to meet and would spend hours enlightening each other on what it was like to be us. Eventually I shared my DID secret with her and she has talked to me about her OCD and mood problems. To be honest, more often than not it was her talking and me listening, but I generally didn't mind because I guess it's a nice break being able to forget about my own issues and listen to someone else's for a while. I felt valued too as a listening ear.

Pou describes to me how at times her mood gets so low and dark that she can't get out of bed in the mornings, doesn't eat, feels so alone and hopeless and thinks death would be a release. Then, within a matter of hours her mood can spring to the opposite extreme. Quite often these swings will happen when I am with her. She may be manic; I find her really hard going when she's like this.

I can tell instantly when she is in this state. I might arrive at her house and beep my horn to collect her and she will burst forth from the house, dancing and jumping and reaching for the sky in exclamation of the beauty of the world. She is very likely to speak to strangers in this state. Quite often it's as though she thinks the whole world is looking at her. So where we might be sitting in a café together, her conversation will become louder and more like she is talking to everyone in the room than to me. She might make loud jokes and then look around to see who is laughing (usually no one is because unfortunately when she is in this mood, her jokes don't tend to be as funny as they are when she is in more of a balanced state). She sometimes behaves very inappropriately too. Last time we went to the cinema, we were walking past some popcorn which had been spilled on the ground. Pou said 'Ooh I'd love to eat some of that popcorn'. Adam and I grimaced and exclaimed about how disgusting that would be, thinking she was joking, but then she went over to it and picked some of the popcorn up and started eating it! I felt embarrassed because people were looking at her as though she was crazy. She didn't care though.

When she is in this state she will also try to wind me up. If she discovers something that annoys me she will do it as much as possible thinking it's funny. Unfortunately, she takes this way too far. I have told Pou on several occasions that I DO NOT like to be touched and I have explained that sometimes I can give her a hug but in general I can't tolerate touch. She will then use this information and try to hug and kiss me and once she even grabbed my boobs and nuzzled her face into them (see here). She can't help it when she's like this and she has lost friendships because of it. She has told me that sooner or later people always get offended or fall out with her for some reason and she doesn't understand why it is. She complains that people don't accept her for who she is. I feel sorry for her, yet at the same time I understand why people do it because when she is in this manic state, it's like she is someone else.

The Pou I made friends with was more placid and down to earth. I struggle with myself when she is like this. I think I need to be more accepting and not get annoyed with her, yet she irritates me so much and I then argue that I wouldn't have made friends with her if she was that person all the time. To be honest, I have always found her much easier to get on with when she is in the depressed state. I have asked her what triggers the mood shifts. She says it could be an argument with her boyfriend or not even an argument, but a perceived rejection. I don't know if there are triggers for the mood swings I see in her when we are together. In the space of half an hour she can go from normal to manic to extremely subdued and introverted for no apparent reason.

She feels her only problem is OCD i.e. because of OCD she becomes overly worried about something and then obsessively thinks about it, which makes her feel down. She doesn't have an explanation for the high times, but as she said herself today, why would she want to change them because they feel so good? How could I tell her that when she is like that she drives people away? Instead I said that surely the high periods are linked in some way to the low periods and is it worth feeling so low to have the high times: wouldn't a balance be more tolerable for her? She mumbled that she supposed so.

I struggle to know what to say to her about this. On one hand, I think I should just keep out of it as she is not the kind of person to take advice from me anyway. Yet on the other hand, I can see that her life is really affected by these swings. She is extremely insecure in her relationships. I've seen so many guys break up with her in the few years we've been friends and she's not been able to understand what went wrong, when to me it seems clear that they couldn't handle her instability. If she got help to find out what is wrong and got treatment for her, she could feel more secure and be more able to maintain friendships. But if I tell her 'by the way Pou I think you might have borderline personality disorder' I don't think she's going to take that too well. Secondly, I don't know enough about borderline personality disorder to be sure that's what she has and I know there are other conditions that could cause these mood shifts too.

However, I am struggling to know what to do about our friendship too. I said before that I felt valued as a listener but all of that has changed. Over the last year I have felt more and more uncared for by her. She often cancels plans with me, usually because she's had a better offer. Quite often now it's to spend time with her current boyfriend (who, by the way is 'the one' and she is already planning to marry him after just a few months, but what would I know about relationships... as Pou reminds me: she's had so many, she's an expert. I've only had the one serious relationship so what would I know? We've managed to stay together for ten years but hey what would I know?). When we do meet up, the conversation is more and more one sided and more and more it's about how amazing her boyfriend is, which is all very well, but I don't need to hear it non stop and forgive me for saying so, but it's very early days and he's just a normal guy. She's so obsessed with him that she's distracted too and it's obvious she isn't really in the present moment with me.

So, at the start of the post I said that I sometimes want to shut myself off from other humans. I've been doing this more and more in recent months. Pou was about my closest friend in the world besides Adam but it's been hard to maintain that with me wanting to push everyone away so trying to distance myself from her at times and her making it really hard for me to want to be her friend at all. A few weeks ago I found myself texting her to see if she wanted to meet up. I had no desire to see her as last time, I felt she had absolutely no interest in me as a person. But I told myself I am being too critical and should just accept her friendship as being more of an acquaintance who I can have a chat and coffee with.

So after much too-ing and fro-ing, because she wanted to make sure her boyfriend wasn't going to be free on a day we planned to meet (wouldn't want to miss out on an extra evening with him would she?) she finally committed to meeting today.

Today she was not manic. Today she was down, very, very down. The reason? She had left her mobile at her boyfriend's house and wasn't going to be seeing him for three whole days so wouldn't be able to talk to him on the phone or text. Fair enough, that's annoying; but you'd have thought he'd just been sent away on a prison ship to Australia for the way she was carrying on. She was so preoccupied and must have mentioned at least ten times during dinner how upset she was about forgetting her phone. She looked like she was going to cry at several points. I tried not to say anything about it. At one point I suggested that it might be liberating not to have a phone but she firmly reminded me that she needs to keep in contact with her family because they are far away. Ever heard of payphones or Internet?

The phone issue aside, I think I spoke about myself for a total of about thirty seconds throughout the whole dinner except to ask her questions about herself. She just talked and talked and talked and talked. At one point she did ask me how it was going with T but to be honest, I don't want to talk to her about it anymore. It's hard for me to talk about my issues at the best of times but I don't feel she is a friend anymore. I don't want to share this part of my life with someone who couldn't care less about me. It didn't take much to steer the conversation away anyway as it didn't appear she was actually all that interested in what I had to say about T.

She invited me back to her house for a cuppa but by the time we had paid the bill I actually felt like I could cry. I told her I wasn't feeling well (which was true, the stress of it was making me feel ill) and I dropped her home. On the way to her house she started on about her phone again and I was so at the end of my tether that I loudly told her to get over it (in a jokey way). I told her absence makes the heart grow fonder. She didn't like to hear that; she said that he was absent enough without being able to even text him. I expressed that this would make the heart grow even fonderer (I don't think that's a word) but this just seemed to annoy her more. I then said that maybe it would be a good thing to remind her that she is her own person. I didn't mean that she has forgotten that (although it would appear she has) but she took it that way and told me I was really annoying her now and that she knew she was her own person and has had enough relationships to realise that (why does she feel the need to keep telling me how many relationships she's had?). I just laughed and let her stew in her annoyance. I was done with it.

So, dear patient enduring reader, what do I do?

Is it me looking for a reason not to be friends with her anymore and should I just keep trying to accept her for who she is even though at the moment spending time with her is about as enjoyable as poking pins in my eyeballs? Or is it clear to you that our friendship is hopeless and that I am flogging a dead horse and should move on?

Or is it something else? Be honest, tell me if I'm just being a dick about all of this.

Any thoughts/opinions/diagnoses welcome.

Once again, thank you if you have made it this far. It never ceases to surprise me when people read my posts and comment on them.