Helplessness

[Friend] asks: "What do you do if you're a worry wart about people not wanting to be your friend anymore?"

I answer:  "Introduce yourself by saying 'Hi, my name is Daniel Webster.'"

That is to say, I totally identify with this question.  I stress endlessly when it comes to relationship changes: partially because I hate the feeling of helplessness when things spiral out of control despite your best efforts, but mostly because I love my friends with all of my heart. To just stop being friends is so...unbearable; like my heart is being ripped out of my chest. 

Unfortunately, most of my efforts to stop such an occurrence once it has started only succeed in exacerbating the situation.  Well, either that or I don't notice the times it worked...probably because it worked. See, if someone is purposely trying to tone back a friendship, they probably have a reason.  To just thrash against it without finding and dealing with the reason is, um, unproductive at best.  At worse, it simply accelerates the demise of the relationship, as one member clams up and the other despairs as attempts to communicate continuously fail.

But there's more!  Um...I just derailed my train of thought...hold on: it'll come to me.  Maybe I'll just move on and remember it as I'm writing other stuff.

I'm not sure if I'm really the best person to ask for advice in this manner, as I am pretty sure all my efforts were fruitless.  Still, I can suggest a few things to do that may or may not work:

1) Communication.

Keep the lines open, but casual.  Talk to them from time to time, make sure they know you still care about them;  don't stop altogether.  If the person needs space and you shut off communication, that just makes it easier for them to disappear (and then say "stopped talking to me").   Space can be translated as "not smothering," not "don't talk to me anymore."  Well, to be fair, I'm sure it varies from situation to situation, but usually asking for space means "you're making me feel smothered."  So talk, but tone it down a bit.

2) What to do when you're sitting around worrying about it.

So if you're anything like me, this comprises about 90% of your waking hours during the time of duress.  I have a tendency to examine and reexamine what I've done and what I think I need to do.  This tends to be a lot of time since sleep doesn't really come so easy when I've got such stuff on my mind (fortunately, it hasn't been a problem in a long time.)  

There's a point when you've done all the thinking you can, and at that point you are just stressing yourself out.  This is when channeling and/or distraction becomes essential; for me this means video games, anime, and many hours of piano playing.  I find that channeling my emotions into art produces some very pleasing results.  In fact, the majority of my best writing and lyrical composition only seems to happen when I'm depressed.  Hmm, maybe that explains why I've had terrible writer's block ever since I met Laura...

3) The impossible

One last thing: even though it's next to impossible to accomplish, try not to worry about it.  It only makes it worse.

Good luck!  I hope everything works out for you.