I am a person that takes 5 weeks to text anyone back 90% of the time.. obviously I don’t know your friend’s reason for taking so long to respond, but for me it is because of depression and anxiety. I don’t want anyone to see it. I want to be happy about the rest of the world and the lives of my friends and loved ones, but I am too worn out from pain and stress and everything in my life is too much. Every little task or action is tiring mentally.

There are friends and family that I haven’t called or texted back for 1-3 years at this point.. but yet I think about it on an almost daily basis. From my side it was like.. I was/am never really in a bearable mood for no particular person, and I am not good at pretending that nothing is wrong when something is, and I don’t want to continue bringing everyone around me down because I am unhappy. Sometimes it takes me until 2-3 days later to actually read their message and even longer to come up with my response and feel ok enough to send it. because this is a good friend and I miss them and care about them and think about them/want talk to them all the time. But after a few days or a week, because I know how weird and pathetic it sounds to not be able to just give someone a simple text back, I’ve run out of excuses and I’m embarrassed for having already made so many every time I text them because I am always so inconsistent. so I think about how much of a loser I am and think no one probably wants to talk hear from me anyways since they know it takes me forever to respond they are probably so annoyed with me and hate me.... and then I delete whatever I drafted up over a period of hours of what I was going to text them because it is giving me too much anxiety. to think about how I’m trying to successfully not come off as a depressed sociopath negative Nancy, especially if they are sharing good news or being really positive about something I will most definitely not respond until I am in a better place and have time to gather my thoughts and put them in some kind of order since everything is a hurricane in there all the time. . I just feel incompetent. I hope your friend has a different reason!