Hey, thanks for your reply. What kinds of things might you like to discuss from your own life?

Below is an example of one of these occurrences. I get it if you're not sure what to say, but I've left it in full in order to let it be the most authentic.

I began a conversation with a friend by email on Nov 21. I heard nothing from him until the 26th when he wrote me back to say that he was not ignoring me and he "will get to this in the coming days." I wrote him back to say that that was fine, and then in the next few days I sent a few emails regarding paying him to answer me, but overall I was not prompting him for actual content of the conversation, just about when we would continue it and if I could pay him to continue. On the 29th, I wrote him one more short email which did ask for a response, but I was only asking for a yes or no about continuing the conversation and payment deal, and was not asking to receive the actual content of the conversation right then. He wrote back on the 29th to say "sorry i didn't get the response out yesterday" and that what was going on in his life was "not an excuse for missing a deadline, but i didn't forget nor was it my intention to not address the things i said i would." He finished this email by saying he "will try to sufficiently unpack [topics I had brought up on Nov 21] and address them as well." We went back and forth a few times after that, discussing the fact that he was busy and didn't have time to respond. He then said "i still want to continue this/our conversation(s)." I wrote back once more on Nov 29; it was clear that he was having a difficult/busy time so I said "reply when you can" and left it alone.

I didn't write him again until Dec 13. He did write me back again on Dec 4 to say that he "[has] not forgotten. and will go back and read your longer, conversations to continue the conversation." To me, this indicates that he is planning to say something more to me, an impression which I also got on the other occasions listed above. As I said, after our exchange on the 29th, I did not write him again until Dec 13. That's two whole weeks that I left him alone because he was working a lot and going through something else that he was heavily involved with (I think he called it "uniquely stressful"). That's in addition to the silence between the 21st when I wrote him and the 26th when he wrote me to say he's going to get to it, and in addition to all the other waiting that I had done since I first began this part of the conversation on the 21st, since even our discussion on the 29th was not the conversation itself but rather a discussion of whether we were going to complete the conversation. This is also in addition to the fact that I have actually been waiting to speak to him in-depth basically since the summer. He has mostly been busy or otherwise preoccupied but when I ask if he just doesn't give a shit and doesn't want to be friends he insists that that's not true and that I'm making him out to be an asshole.

I finally asked him, on Dec 15, after all of my waiting since Nov 21, whether there was something more that he planned to say. He said, on Dec 16, that "the conversations referenced in those emails were the main interwoven conversations about you/me/us/etc. and the meta-conversation about how we were engaging that arose from [a package accidentally] getting shipped to my house. that was what i was talking about in those emails. if that's the content that you are alluding to." He said this without actually answering my question about whether he planned to reply, a question which at that moment I felt had been hanging in the air for weeks; I'm pointing this out to you to show you that this is the moment where the interaction starts to get very difficult for me, because I have already waited weeks for a response, and then I asked him directly about it, and he wrote out a long and descriptive sentence without actually answering the question. And this is in addition to the knowledge that it can take a while for him to write me back, so now I have an additional waiting period for this simple yes-or-no question, before I can answer the question of whether my other waiting period is done. Anyway, I asked him again: "Yes, that is the content I'm alluding to. Am I waiting to hear something else about that?" He said "i don't know. i feel like a lot of those things have been talked through, but can continue to be discussed if you feel there's value in it."

I am trying to assess whether I am crazy and I am imagining that he said he would respond. If I am delusional and imagining it, that is a serious problem and I need to seek out help for why I don't see reality correctly. But first I need to confirm whether I am delusional or not. Also, this is really only the precursor to the current issue that I am facing. On January 1 I wrote him to ask if I could pay him to explain to me what happened here and if I misunderstood the situation. I am desperately trying to asses whether I have trouble with social interactions or whether some other kind of problem is going on here and it happens that he has valuable information about that. Obviously he doesn't care much about talking to me, so I offered to pay him to talk it out with me. He said he would, and I asked if he could respond by Jan 10. That seems like a short deadline but I had been waiting for so long, it was getting exhausting. Then Jan 10 comes around, he says sorry I'll get it to you by tomorrow and you don't have to pay since it's late; then Jan 11 comes and I don't receive the reply (maybe I did something to ruin that process by insisting I wanted to pay him anyway?), then I asked him this past Friday what I could do to make it happen and he said giving him $60 now would be "fine" but then when I tried to meet up with him to give him the money he barely communicated. Even if he was unable to meet up, you would think that after repeatedly flaking out on me that he would at least take the time to say "sorry I couldn't meet up, let's meet up on x day at y time." But he couldn't even take the time to do that. I am desparate for this information, I don't have a lot of money but on Friday I offered him $300 over the next two months to resolve this and he still hasn't responded.