eleanor says:
Whatsapp groups are a convenient way to keep in touch. You can make plans without having to send separate messages, crowdsource advice and, hopefully, when you need it, support. They’re like mobile digital conference calls. I’m in two family groups (my siblings and me, our partners and our dad in one; my mum in another) and two for small groups of friends. Convenience and fun aside, that’s a lot of upkeep. I open my phone sometimes to find I have 87 notifications: 26 pictures of my nephew throwing toast on the floor, 20 of our various dogs and reams of laugh-crying emojis. Sometimes I turn my phone off for a break when I get tired of seeing that little red number creeping up.
There is something else going on for you, I think. You feel shackled to these groups, even though they are a source of anxiety, through fear of the reaction if you left them. Similarly, if you don’t reply, you perceive that you’re being punished for it and that the chats themselves are bitchy. That’s a sad way to feel: these people are your friends. It strikes me that not having said something already may be reflective of your confidence levels in general.
A helpful question to ask is: do the chats you have on your small screens correlate with the ones you have with each other in real life, with the rhythm of face-to-face conversation and when words are chosen in context? To an extent, we can ‘get away with’ saying more barbed things when we don’t have the person they’re directed to in front of us. But without being able to read someone’s reactions or judge their current state of mind, it is also very easy to type things we feel are innocuous and for them to be misinterpreted. I wonder what’s going on in your group; how purposefully catty your friends are being, and how much of this is down to the wrong thing being said at the wrong time. In any case, you owe it to your well-being to say something.
You prefer talking in person. So, perhaps when you’re with the friend you’re closest to, explain your anxious feelings. You can do this while acknowledging potential for misinterpretation. Everyone has different levels of resilience and this is not trivial to you. I hope these friends can see that.