Is my friend an energy vampire?

The exhaustion. Nobody reaches for a word like that about an old friend unless the tiredness has gone on for a long time and has a shape. You hang up and feel emptied out. You see the name on the screen and something in you goes down before you have read the message.

It is right about the direction of traffic, too. One person brings the crisis and the other brings the listening. One person calls at eleven and the other answers. The label noticed that the flow only runs one way, and that is a fair thing to have noticed.

And it is right that something is being taken. Time, evenings, the attention you did not have for your own life because it was already spent. None of that is in dispute here.

At the other person. The label is a description of them, and a description of them hands you nothing to do except leave, avoid, or protect yourself from a hazard. You have probably tried all three and found that the next call still gets answered.

That is the clue the label cannot explain. If the drain lived entirely in the friend, distance would fix it. It does not, because the thing that runs is on your side of the call. A request begins. Before it has finished, you have already said yes. The reasons arrive afterward, and they sound sensible every time.

The label also tends to travel. The same tiredness shows up with a sibling, a colleague, a partner, a different friend. A word for one person cannot explain a thing that follows you across five. A sequence can.

The label also asks you to judge what kind of person someone is. That question has no end. The one underneath it does. What happens in your body in the seconds before you say yes?

The chest goes first. For a lot of people it is a drop, a sinking under the breastbone, that arrives when the phone lights up and before the name has been read. That drop is the body signal: what you feel in the body as the pattern starts, ahead of any thought about it.

This is the sequence the archive files as The Draining Bond: in you it runs on a friendship rather than a romance. The moves are the same. The reasoning arrives at the same answer no matter what the numbers were, and the answer is always yes.

Because a pattern is not about a person. It is a sequence that runs on a cue, which is the thing that sets it off, and the cue here is someone needing something. Any someone. The friend is where it is loudest right now, which is why the label landed on them.

Check your own history. Think of the last three people you were tired by. If the shape was the same each time, the same drop and the same yes, then the shape is yours and it is portable. That is better news than it sounds. A thing that is yours can be caught.

Where it was learned is a separate question. Perhaps you were the one who kept the peace at home, or the one who could not stand to see anyone upset. Perhaps not. SOURCE UNKNOWN is a complete answer. The sequence runs the same either way, and it is caught the same way.

At the drop, not at the friendship. The friendship is a decision for a calm afternoon. The drop is a moment, and it is the only part of this with a time on it. Insight does not change the sequence. Repeating the different action does.

The delay is the whole move. The sequence needs the yes inside a few seconds, and a yes that arrives an hour later was chosen rather than fired. Some of those chosen answers will still be yes. The point is that they were yours.

Catch: feel the body signal and name the pattern before it becomes the behavior. Intercept: interrupt the usual response and choose a different action before the old pattern completes. Rewrite: repeat the different action until it becomes easier to reach when the signal returns. Three moves, in that order, at the drop.

What your friend does with a delayed answer is their business and this page makes no guess about it. What you do with the drop is yours, and it is the only part that was ever available to change.