THANK YOU for starting this thread. I have so many friend issues, it's crazy. 

topppppptop

I kinda have friend issues I guess, but mostly issues with actually hanging out with the friends.

so, my best friend (let's call her Joy) and I love to hang out- it's like the one thing in life that makes me happy. but, Joy's family is very busy through the weeks and goes on vacation often. this means I'm lucky to see Joy twice a month :( 

and then there's another friend we'll call Aria. she, like me, is homeschooled and lives relatively close. we get to see each other very often. but, we're almost exact opposites. irl, I'm very loud, confident (ish), outgoing (ish), and have many intrests Aria has never heard of (such as Star Wars and Zelda). Aria is quiet, humble, and a bit shy. she is interested in things I honestly don't give much thought to, like dogs and softball. we do both like art and yelling at our younger siblings (even if I have one and she has three). my mom wants me to hang out with Aria more, but I have no idea what to talk about or do.

then, there's my friends at track practice. I'm good friends with them, but I don't ever see them outside of track (apart from one jogging past my house once). at track, talking and socializing aren't really allowed. kids have gotten punished for talking while doing after-practice stretching. 

advice would be appreciated, especially about Aria, as her birthday party is tomorrow and I'm invited. after tomorrow, advice about Joy would be great :) 

So I have these friends (I shall dub them... Lupa and Nova).  I've been hanging out with Lupa since sixth grade and Nova since seventh.  A year and a half ago, this other person who I guess I'm friends with now but called me his friend long before I thought of him the same (we'll call him Cosmos) started sitting at our lunch table.

Cosmos has autism which pretty severely affects his social skills.  He is mostly unaware of social norms and boundaries which have made him pretty unpopular at my school.  He also has had very very few friends in his lifetime (in fact, mine is the only birthday party he's ever been to) and he sees levels of friendship VERY differently than other people.  Like, he and I talked a few times and then he considered me his best friend.  He also doesn't know how to recognize social cues-- I've seen people be VERY passive-agressive toward him and he doesn't even know they don't like him.

Which means if you want to tell him something, you've got to be very blunt about it.  And here's the problem with that:  He has anxiety and depression and is prone to falling into deep depressed states once he picks up even a little bit that someone is upset with him.  He spends a lot of time in the guidance counselor's office at school.

Nova and Lupa do NOT like Cosmos.  AT ALL.  They get really annoyed with him and just generally do not like being arround him.  Cosmos has no idea and even thinks they're his friends.  I honestly don't know where he got that, though, because the annoyance is practically tangible whenever they're in the same room.  They Really.  Strongly.  Do. Not. Like. Him.

(contd later but my computer is about to die and i really don't want to retype all this) 

Uggh, I feel you guys. I've been feeling increasingly unhappy with my friendships :(

So first I have a friend who doesn't go to my school anymore, so she's always wanting to call me and talk about the latest gossip and that sort of stuff. The thing is, I don't care about gossip and I really hate talking on the phone. So I've been putting off calling her and I just didn't even answer the phone last time, and now she might be mad, so that's great. 

I have two school-friends that are both extroverts, and the one always talks so loudly, and has no sense of self-consiousness or personal space, which I am very sensitive to. The other is always talking about her sports things and saying, "Oh, I'm so worried for my track meet, I don't think I'll get a good time," or whatever about ten times per conversation. I'm trying to be supportive of her since she really cares about her sports, but I'm not involved in any of that and find it very boring (especially with her repeating everything ten times in a row). Sometimes I'm not sure why I'm friends with them because I feel kind of trapped in those relationships, and they don't care about the things I care about. And I'm just so tired of extroverts right now.

I also have another friendship that's perfect, and we both have so much in common. But this friend and I are both so quiet that we don't really talk to each other, and I find it so hard to start a conversation with her (she probably feels the same about me though). I really want to get to know her better, but we both like communicating over email better. 

There are only two more weeks of school for me, but my parents always want me to invite friends over in the summer and "have some fun" with them. They don't seem to understand that I like spending time with myself more than with other people. Of course I can have fun talking to a friend for a while, but nothing is the same as going on a walk by myself to somewhere where no one else is and just sitting in silence. I feel like no one really understands me, and I can never be who I really am with other people. Sorry for all the deep stuff. I'm not usually a complainer, but this is like an outlet for me. 

Ohhhhh here we go.  I just recently cut off a few toxic friends and thought I'd figured everything out, but no.  I started at a new school in November, knowing nobody and feeling very socially akward, and my first friend was this girl I'll call V.  She was super cool at first and through her I made a bunch of new friends.  But over time she's been... not a great friend, to say the least.  All she wants to talk about is herself, she complains constantly, she's super self-centered, always gets involved in things that aren't hers to get involved in, and esentially has a hero/main character complex.  These things frusterate me so much and heavily affect our friendship, but every time I try to call her out for it she plays the victim and turns everything on me.  I'd love to tell her how I feel, but she can be really rude and I don't want to lose my other friends...

ugg I relate to all of you guys so much. I've been having such a hard time lately with friendships and things. I went to a really tiny middle school. Like really really tiny. My eighth grade graduating class was 14 kids and the eighth grade there now is 8. I've known these kids my ENTIRE life but I've always had poor social skills. In eighth grade we started hanging out all the time, like every weekend and like I had a friendgroup and that made me happy but they we'rent exactly close to me. My best friend since second grade (lets call her Ivy) left for seventh grade but came back in eighth and she had changed a lot. Her parents moved her out of the city during quarantine and she got severly depressed. She was very on and off and would freak out on me at the most random times. I felt really alone at that time becuase although I had this group of friends, they ignored me and cut me off and regarded me as boring because my parents had severley restricted my social media, electronic, and tv intake until this past summer. So thas a quick back story.

My mother didn't exactly give me a choice over where I went to high school so i went to the high school version of my middle school which was equally small. There had been a lot of drama in my middle school I really didnt want it or them to follow me to high school. But then I became friends with this girl (who I'm going to call Rose). Rose had joined that school in seventh grade and has so many friends i was shocked. Everyone she meets falls in love with her but she's not even that good of a person. Her "love language" Is bullying and at first I went along with it but then it started to hurt. She called my interests embarrising because she wasn't interested in them. She would randomly tell me she wasn't going to talk to me for spring break or the weekend simply because she needed to forget about our school (she hates it there) and that I would remind her of it because I go there. At the same time, Ivy was becoming entirely unrecognizable. She took pride in the fact that she stole ice cream from target, that she got terrible grades, that she wanted to drop out of high school after freshman year. I was there for her all of last year but now when I told her I was miserable and depressed she brushed it off and said "well I'm not" She drives me crazy and whenever I see her, I feel so depleted afterwards. She doesnt listen to me. I keep thinking of dropping her but then I remember all the good times we had and how I've known her since I was tiny. But then she posts on her instagarm story about harming herself, about how she has delusions and I wont even go into the fact that she tells other people that she has schizophrenia and pretends to talk to the air when were with our old classmates but not me. She says she has PTSD from her parenst making her grow up too fast and making her parent her little sister but I know her parents almost as well as I know my own and they treat her and her sister like Queens. 

On top of this, Rose met a few of my old classmates though some of her friends and now she's closer to them than I ever was. I feel so lonely and I only have like two close friends but they both make me feel miserable. I dont know what to do about any of this.

Yikes this is a long post sorry :l

My friend problems don't feel very significant in comparison to y'all's, but I guess that's what this thread is here for so if this sounds unnecessary you can scroll past...

There's a girl at my school who I have had a platonic crush on the entire year. She's a huge nerd (I think she would be perfect for the CB), especially about fiber arts which I didn't even know you could be a nerd about; she loves fantasy books, she likes art, she likes AURORA, she's basically a cheerful magical being who has a lot of cheerful magical friends so she doesn't really need me at all. I've spent the entire year trying to work up the nerve to talk to her, and it's only really succeeded within the past week (literally one of the last weeks of the school year) because of a group project in English (we had to make a playlist based on American identity, and made the entire thing Asian, it was very fun). So now we're...good acquaintances? Almost-friends? It's definitely progress but feels kind of anticlimactic after a YEAR of effort on my part. Why is it so hard to talk to people???? Also why do I get so attached to people I barely know??? *cries* 

I'm going to try to ask her to hang out during the summer...wish me luck. Do any of y'all have any other ideas? I haven't had to make friends since middle school so I'm very rusty...and also very nostalgic for third grade when you could just walk up to someone and say, "Do you want to be friends?" And they'd say yes and it would be so simple...