AIO: Might lose a friendship over precautions and pandemic awareness?
Just need some perspective and to vent…
A friend I have had since kindergarten has been pushing for an in-person hang session. I told her my boundaries: 1) test on my Pluslife, 2) cancel if either of us have symptoms (even if a test is negative), 3) cancel if we have been near symptomatic individuals or asymptomatic individuals with known positive tests. She agreed but later said she was “bending over backwards” to make me comfortable. I said, if this is “bending over backwards” then maybe we should just stick to Zoom for now. Then she sent the attached message.
We haven’t hung out in person since the summer of 2023 because I had two family members have major health crises involving intense treatment and surgery, but we have had a number of Zoom calls since then. She insists she takes “a lot” of precautions: vaccinates yearly, only gets takeout, and only hangs out with a small group of people. But she was asking me to meet her and her family at a restaurant for her birthday, wanted to get pedicures a week before a family member’s surgery, attends football games because her family has season tickets, and works in an office every day. Her mom has tested positive 4 times, was on oxygen for nearly a year, and early last year they thought she had a stroke but it was just her brain swelling. When she was in the hospital for this encephalopathy I asked if she masked, and she said she didn’t except in her mom’s room because it was required.
She has already betrayed my trust around Covid: 1) came over to my house coughing in March of 2020 and got mad at me when I kicked her out; 2) came over and hung out all day, but as she was leaving mentioned that her roommate was “super sick” and testing to see if it was Covid; 3) had been begging to hang out in person (luckily I declined, cases were too high for me) and then later in the same text exchange mentioned she wasn’t feeling well; 4) lied and told me she has only had Covid once (she has “allergies” a number of times every year) but then slipped up recently and told me it was actually twice that she’s tested positive.
I feel very alone. Most of my friends have gone “back to normal” and look at me like I’m being extreme. I can’t bring up Covid; either their eyes gloss over than they stare at me with a blank expression or they get weirdly defensive. Before this text exchange, I asked her how do we go back to normal? Everyone is sick, new autoimmune issues everyday, new health problems, people are still dying - and she said I should try Buddhism. I feel like her responses are super flippant and, on top of this, I think the division in our morals is starting to cause problems for me as well. Am I overreacting? Being a bad friend? How do I even tell her all of this without blowing the friendship up anyway? It feels like a lost cause and I’m losing hope and perspective.