You know what’s funny? I’ve been meaning to edit a post for days because I didn’t think it was a good idea to post it as I wrote it. But instead of doing that right now, I am going to start an entirely new post.
Whatever, it’s my blog. I do what I want. Today I am going to talk about friends.
I recently stumbled upon some pictures online of a group of girls I used to hang out with. And you know, I felt sad for a moment because the pictures were beautiful and they looked very happy together, certainly happier than I felt at the time. I spent some time contemplating whether the disintegration of these friendships was due to some flaw I should identify and work on, because there’s nothing I shoot for more than keeping my personal failures new and fresh. Failure can be funny, but stale failure is just kind of sad.
And I did think about it for a long time. But really, juxtaposed with the many flaws I know i have, i had a hard time pulling any meaningful lesson out of the situation. These girls and I, we’d never had a falling out. They didn’t get together and decide to kick me out of the club because i suck. They were just catty and horrible to each other, and I found it so alienating that I just stepped further and further out of the circle until I couldn’t see it anymore.
I know that some of the problem is that I don’t have enough stamina for natural social dynamics that are a little shitty in nature but also pretty natural. People will always talk about the one in the group who isn’t there— I know that I should work on taking that less personally. But I think the other part of the problem is that the picture is a big lie. You see these smiling happy faces, and you think, hey, these people are sharing something special…wouldn’t it be nice to connect with a whole group of people like that? But woven into these interlaced arms are all sorts of scandals. Sleeping with each others’ boyfriends, gossiping about things shared in confidence, spreading hurtful rumors. They did it all.
Sometimes I think that my only hope for normalcy would be to get a thicker skin, care more about my social networking profiles, or develop a fear of being alone.
It seems to me like either:
1. functionally the entire world measures happiness and fulfillment solely by how happy and fulfilled they can appear to others, how convincing their personal brands are. check out my perfect life on myspace, now featuring a miley cyrus song that really speaks to me!
or
2. the problem is not actually with everyone else on earth, but just me.
I get so emotionally invested in my friends that it is very damaging for me to have many of them, or any bad ones. I keep a small circle and I expect that each person in it really has my back, but I have seriously had a terrible run or been exercising some terrible judgment or something. More than a year ago, I lost my cool with one of my best friends for coming to town and treating my boyfriend horribly. I mean, horribly. I was embarrassed for having put the boy through it and too upset to fix the resulting damage to the friendship myself, but I had some misplaced faith that with time she would. Annie admitted to me this weekend that when my dad died, she sent an email to this friend to let her know. The response was a curt acknowledgment and a request to not email her again. After a year of telling myself that there were plenty of excuses for this behavior that didn’t include simply not caring, it pretty much broke my heart to hear.
Less than a month ago, I lost my cool with one of my best friends over a string of actions that I found hypocritical, selfish, and cruel. I know that unless she experiences some extreme personal growth, she’ll never care enough to take initiative to fix things on her own. In between, I lost one of my best friends because someone asked him not to talk to me anymore. I mourn these friends and lament my foolishness in thinking that they were more.
I find myself in a perpetual state of feeling like I’m the only person who will chase after someone I love if I’m the one who fucked up. Or even if it’s ambiguous. And since that makes me feel pretty alone regardless, I am much less interested than usual in the lame song and dance of going to movies or going to dinner or catching up with familiar faces. It doesn’t do anything for me right now.
Well, it wouldn’t be a memorly.com post if I didn’t find a way to whine about how out of place I feel in the world. So here’s another theory, this one developed in college when I should have been doing my physics homework was this: poor people and rich people value totally different things in friends.
I have a lot of love for my home, but nobody there is rich. Being a kid is scary any way you slice it and I’m not trying to say anyone has it any worse or any better, but worrying about meeting your basic needs for survival is different than worrying about a sick relative or whether you’ll have any friends at your new school. Nobody else can help cure your grandmother or get you through your first day at your seventh elementary school, but a true friend can get you through the most of the problems my friends had. The same kids your family harbored when things were rough at home turn into the teenagers who you call drunk at 2 in the morning because a boy broke your heart and you need a ride home from a party but aren’t even sure what city you’re in. The friends who wake up their girlfriends, get out of bed, and find that random cross-street in that random city where you have randomly found yourself. I feel so uncomfortable asking people for favors, and I think it’s a response to missing having friends who would, and did, do anything for each other.
And then I grew up and went to the big rich kid school and met a lot of really clever and bubbly people. Who mostly turned out to be clever, bubbly assholes. And for a long time I blamed it on Duke, on Duke students. But if I’m going to try to be fair and attempt to intellectualize the phenomenon, the best I can do is that very few of my classmates grew up in an environment like mine, where everyone has very similar problems and those problems are only tolerable if you have a few really loyal friends. My childhood friends prized no quality higher than loyalty. My college friends, whose diverse sets of problems were generally less treatable with quality companionship, looked for and most valued companions who amused them.
My friends from home may not always (or ever) understand my life now, but they are always true. And my cousins and I might not keep up with each others’ busy lives as well as we used to, but at the end of Anne Marie’s bachelorette party, we couldn’t help but look around and pat ourselves on the backs for being the last ones standing. Not just because of our naturally incredible alcohol tolerance, but because some things matter and always will.
I just wish I felt that more often, from the people I meet in my life here. Sometimes I feel like my upbringing did not prepare me for my future. Most times it is very hard for me to embrace the idea that I won’t always be floating alone in the ether.
I am disabling commenting for this post because I didn’t write this to get opinions. i just wrote it to get it off my chest.