I should give a bit of context to start. I've been downshifting. I live abroad in a cheaper country where I'm allowed to stay for quite a while. I'm just at the tail end of completing my studies to make a big career change. There's other downshifters in my neighborhood, and one of them happened to live not far from me (3 blocks maybe) when I lived in NYC. We got along and were each other's confidants. At some point she proposed hooking up, but I told her (and this was before really seeing myself as a p-addict or s-addict) that it was a taboo for me to mess around with a neighbor. She respected it but we nonetheless spent a lot of time together and were wing men to one another. Recently I went back home to the US to see relatives for two months and it was in this time that I truly realized, recognized and started to understand my problems with sex and porn. My neighbor, well, she asked me to courier her new iphone back for her. Unfortunately it seems that it was stolen on the way to my house and her friend who sent it to me only paid 100 bucks of insurance on it. To my embarassment, among all the packages I was bringing back for her, I didn't realize this until the last minute before packing for my flight. Super embarassing as I already had a phone packed in my luggage for someone else. When I came back to our country of residence she seemed to excuse the phone. She makes a lot of money, and seems to blame her friend. I offered to pay for some of it and she refused. We made a deal for me to pay for it once I've work and am doing okay. After discussing, as usual, some of her romantic and intimate rendezvous with local guys, just as a good listener or totally platonic witness to her life abroad, I told her about my revelation about porn addiction and sex addiction. We had discussed super intimate things like that before, truly barefaced and all. She's been despondent after that. Sure, we do have a problem because of the war in Ukraine. Everyone where we are is stressed that we will be next, so no one is themself, but I feel like maybe she moved on from our friendship, or maybe telling her about it, despite her happiness for me, maybe she felt gross that she was attracted to such a guy at some point. I really don't know. It feels weird. She lives right across the hall. I find myself hoping I'll cross paths with her, and it feels unhealthy. She seems to ghost me now or respond really late to my messages and say she is too tired to hangout or something. I realize in this downshifting lifestyle I'm leading now while I live abroad cheaply that I need to make more friendships but I was so smitten with our conversations and how our sense of humor flowed so well. She's a person who is always plugged-in to a scene, and she always knew where to go and where the fun was at. Sucks.
Yeah, I mean, I have sent multiple texts and not gotten a response. Once in a while there is a response to something. I didn't think much of it because we have very different schedules. She works at night on EST, and I'm free to sort of do whatever, whenever I would like. But now that I'm looking back at my texts, a bunch of them aren't necessary. Things like complaints about the neighbors doing construction work on a Sunday. I haven't and she hasn't mention the p-addict/s-addict conversation since. I'm all ears for your thoughts or advice, but if there's more you'd like to know, sure, shoot away.
I think the move, at this point, is to just move on from it, and branch out, get into local life here, and if it comes back, decide then. However, I'm skeptical of this thought because a part of me can see it coming out of hurt, and being spiteful, though I also just see it as a cost of honesty that I'm willing to stomach. My friend is, I would say, probably not good at conflict, and has a very avoidant attachment style (according to her own therapist), so I have a feeling addressing it with her might not really be in the cards at all.
Yeah, funny that she responded the next day. However, it still doesn't feel the same. Something's off. At first I was really sad, and then I had a bit of apathy and saw it as a way to move forward. Now, I'm angry. I don't really want to talk to her at all.
It's fine. Her message(s) were just acknowledgments of something I wrote her about doing banking locally. Nothing really important that she had to follow up on. She simply wrote me back a day later with rather flat acknowledgments of what I said and that was it.
Your feedback would be helpful. I have to admit that I haven't been able to send the message you sent, and time is getting past us, and things are not really evolving. I keep running into her on my way, in the hallway, etc. She seems to simply just be very friendly and ask pretty superficial stuff, and then she goes on to tell me about her evening out and her plans, etc., etc. Or, I've tried to really just give a day or two of space, and then I ask if she'd like to go for a walk or get dinner, and of course I don't get a message until the day after, and it's her saying she's busy doing this, that or the other. At this point, I think it might be appropriate to say something more to this effect, given how time has past, "Hey, I have this lingering feeling from our conversation that night when I talked about coming to face one of my truest demons. It's given me some anxiety as I'm not really used to talking about it, and it's not very pleasant for people to hear about, as I've come to learn. Feels like maybe something changed from that night on between us. I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable or crossed a boundary in telling you that. If it has, I hope you can forgive me."
