Question #15
“My friends are always doing fun things without me, and I feel left out. What do I do about this?”
Dear N,
Maybe all you have to do is ask. It could be that your friends might not know that you’re interested in the fun things, or they just didn’t think of you when making the plan. Bring it up the next time you are together, and see what happens. You could say, “Hey, I really felt left out when y’all went to X without me. Can you let me know next time?”
It could also be that you’re friends are making choices on your behalf because they don’t think you’ll want to come. “N works a lot, so maybe they won’t want to go out on Thursday. N doesn’t like this genre of music, so we won’t get them a ticket. etc, etc.” In that case, you can ask them to at least give you the option of saying yes or no, which is the important part: that you feel included in the plan, even if you don’t participate in it.
But maybe they are excluding you on purpose, because they don’t want to spend time with you in that way. That can be a really hard thing to realize. In that case, you might have to re-evaluate this friendship. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to be friends with them anymore, but it probably means that you have to change how you view the friendship because they don’t see it the same way that you do. That’s okay too. You can always make new friends that are looking for a similar kind of friendship that you are.
