To the friends we pushed away,

It probably brought a lot of confusion to you when we began to slowly withdraw ourselves from society. We begin to turn down social event after social event before the invitations stopped coming our way altogether. Here's the thing, we didn't want you to stop asking us to hang out. We were hoping that one day we would finally have the emotional strength and energy to get ourselves to go out and face the world. It made us feel a glimmer of hope that someone still cared enough to reach out and spend time with us. We aren't really ourselves anymore, however, and we don't want to feel like a burden.

You may notice the way we talk to you isn't the same either. We may become meaner or just not that talkative. The snappy comments aren't intentional attacks on you. We're just so tired facing our internal demons that we have a low threshold for anything else. It actually makes us feel even more guilty for the way we treat other people.

We don't talk about what is going on with us because we don't want to make other people sad. It's some truly dark stuff going on inside our minds and telling others about what's going on could really bring them down as well. We want to protect you from our thoughts and inner demons.

We don't want you to feel like you aren't doing enough to help, so it's easier to not tell you anything at all.

We notice that you slowly stop talking to us. You probably think we don't like you anymore, so you stop trying to break down our walls.

We secretly want you to keep trying, it gives us some glimmer of hope that someone out there cares enough about us. The day you left us, it was hard, but we also can understand that dealing with someone who has depression can be very demanding for someone.

We wanted you to be by our side at our highs and lows, but you're not anymore.

We're sorry we pushed you away.

We didn't mean to hurt you, but our depression made us feel like we weren't worthy of being your friend.

We're trying to get better but sometimes it's really hard.

We hope one day we can be friends again.