Hey everyone,

So long story short, I had to permanently leave my hometown a few years ago to escape my abusive family. Thanks to my dissociative amnesia, I immediately blocked out/ forgot pretty much everything and everyone from my old life.

Now I’m a bit stuck on if I want to try to reconnect with people from my hometown/ high school. A few years have passed and I’m doing somewhat better than I was a few years ago. But I can’t really remember these people still, and so I’m struggling to figure out if it’s a good idea to try reconnecting with them. Sometimes I do miss them and feel this aching pain inside my heart. But I can’t tell if I’m just feeling nostalgia for the way things used to be or if I actually miss these people.

One issue is that I never came out to them as trans, and so that’s something I’d have to do now if I try to reconnect with them. I’m not quite sure who will be supportive and who won’t- I come from a somewhat conservative area so it’s even trickier for me to try and guess which if my old friends will be accepting.

In high school, I had a really close-knit group of friends, but our friend group eventually broke apart. One cause of this is that I went no-contact with a friend who was abusing me; the others stayed in contact with her and kept inviting her to events so I had to distance myself. I know this was kind of a shitty move on their part, but I’m not really sure if that means I shouldn’t reconnect with them, either- I still do have sympathy for the abusive friend, and don’t feel like she deserved to be ostracized and have no friends or something. I know she was struggling a lot with her own mental health.

I feel like people from high school will be mad at me for just randomly disappearing like that four years ago. But no one knew my family situation at the time, I pretty much hid all my struggles from all of them. And these days I find it so hard to make new friends and feel so isolated a lot of the time that I’ve been wondering if it could be worth it to try to rekindle old friendships just so I’m not so alone. I also am just kind of curious about these people I used to be so close with, if that makes any sense.

The biggest issue though is my memory loss. I feel like I can’t predict how an attempt at resuming contact would go because it’s been so long and I’ve forgotten a lot of things about these people. I could really use some advice.

There’s one particular person I’m thinking of who I really miss. And I heard she’s been struggling with her abusive parents and I can sympathize with her situation.

The other problem is that anything connected to my hometown or high school years is automatically a ptsd trigger. Would it do me more harm than good to try and reconnect with people from that time? I imagine it could affect my ptsd symptoms. And maybe we’re just too different now. I just don’t know. Is it better to just let the past lie buried?

These friends could be kind of shitty sometimes and were not the most empathetic or trauma informed people at the time- but high schoolers are still growing and no one is at their best in hs, and I know a lot could have changed since then. Is it worth risking it?