I apologize about the lack of blogging up here, but elements in my academic, personal and professional life have hindered me from really sitting down and putting pen to paper, or in my case fingers to key board.
Here’s an entry I posted on my personal blog. I typically write about more personal everyday occurrences in that blog and felt this entry was “deep enough” to have a home here as well.
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Taken from my personal blog:
I slept fairly shitty last night, for an assortment of reasons. Number one though, was probably that discolored chicken sandwich lodged in my stomach I had while at Christine’s Birthday Dinner last night.
The birthday dinner was great, I don’t see many of my “band friends” these days, since I work and go to graduate school full time, Hell, I even saw my roommate for like 2 hours. That’s the longest length of time that I’ve seen him in ages.
Aside from this week being the typically hectic busy week at work and school, I think the strain of some events in my personal life are starting to affect me to the point where all I want to do is clam up and disclose no additional information to anyone about the comings and goings of my life. I get like this a lot when I feel vulnerable. I never like to appear weak and feeble (emotionally), so I just tuck it away in hopes that no one will notice. I guess Damian said it best once, that he feels like, “everyone comes to me with their problems, but no one has time to listen to mine.”
I feel like I spread myself extremely thin a lot of the time to please certain people in my life, and lately it’s gotten to the point where I’m like a rubberband banding together a stack of papers to high, liable to pop at any moment, scattering the assortment of papers everywhere. Just making an overall unorganized mess.
It’s those same people with their consistent issues that drain on you day in and day out, and the one day or week you’re feeling pretty low, they don’t “have time” or don’t care to listen to you…when you’ve inconvenienced yourself and others in your life to “be there for them” when they needed you all those times. It just goes to show you how some people really are.
A friend of mine also brought up an interesting topic to ponder on last night. He said and I paraphrase, “Being friends is hard.”
And it made me think for a second.
Is being friends really hard?
His response to a text message I sent him sent me into an utter spaz to survey of all of my friendships. I thought about every person I’ve befriend.
I have friendships that are flawless. We’ve gotten along perfectly, smooth sailing all the way, no problems.
And then I have friendships with bumpy roads. These are the friendships where we don’t always see eye to eye on everything. These are also the friendships that have made me stronger, quicker on my feet, and more observant and understanding towards other people. Ironically enough, until attending college/graduate school, I’ve never really had to deal with those “bumpy roads” in friendships. I guess all of my friends in high school were generally easy going people, with similar up-bringings, so we automatically understood each other better with little effort from either side.
And even my friends that I don’t always see eye to eye on with everything are just as important to me as my friends I see eye to eye on everything with. Matter of fact I like befriending people who are completely different from me. It makes me feel like I’m a better person for having “variety in my diet” so to speak. I could get all philosophical and go into specs, but you get the point I’m sure.
Hopefully up to this point, I haven’t offended anyone, if I have, I apologize, but these are just thoughts floating around in my mind. Feel free to stop reading here.
So I thought, and thought and thought about his statement. Thinking to myself, “Should being friends really be that hard?”
And I came up with two answers to that complex statement (not sure if he meant it to be this complex, but it could take on more than one meaning).
- Friendships should not be something that drains you dry of all available emotion. The people that generally distress me to that point are also the people I vaguely consider associates (example, my co-workers) and tend to shy away from unless otherwise obligated to be around them. I generally don’t care to make an effort to hold hands and sing coom-ba-ya, I just tolerate them enough to get through the work day and go about my business. I don’t invest any real time into them.
Like any relationship (family orientated, romantic, or otherwise) though, it is something that takes effort, but shouldn’t be anything that you are straining to do or entirely impossible to handle. I like to think that the more “walls” you knock down, the easier it is to understand each other.
- My second answer to this is yes: by “hard” it takes some effort. You can’t just sit around frozen and completely detached from the world and expect someone to forcefully “get to know you”. Or “understand you” until you give them some substance and reveal yourself to them on who you really are as a person. It just doesn’t work that way. I doubt anyone wants to put that much effort to anyone that frozen. I’m not saying the way I approach friendships is “the right way,” but I generally like to consider everyone innocent until proven guilty, in other words I don’t like to make assumptions about my friends until they’ve otherwise cleared them up. It can also be “hard” in the sense that you have to actually make efforts to keep in touch (go figure, eh). I have friends from high school that attend college hundreds of miles away in other states, and although I don’t talk to them regularly (because both of us are busy with our lives), we still make an effort to meet up over holidays (when we’re both in our home town) or exchange emails and phone calls from time to time just to say “hello”. No, it’s not “easy”, but it’s worth it because we’re friends. I still consider these people some of my closest friends. I have friends that live minutes from me right here in Greenville that I see less than my friends in other states (^see paragraph 2 from above). And outside elements (outside of everyone’s control) may have contributed to that.
So to sum everything up, yes, a friendship is not a “piece of cake” or a “walk in the park” (geez, I need to stop using these catch phrases), it is something that takes effort from both parties involved. And the effort should be mutual, not one sided, causing one person to feel strained, or pulled or neglected. No one likes to feel neglected. And although it takes effort, it shouldn’t be something painfully forced, or obligated, because otherwise, what’s the point in investing time into someone that won’t invest time into you? You’d be better off cutting your losses and saving your energy for another friend.
Clearly I have a lot to learn about myself and how I handle these types of situations. Perhaps I read entirely too much into his statement, but it just completely caught me off guard because I’ve never heard that before. He probably meant nothing by it, really, but he brought up a good point for me to ponder on. Hopefully this friend of mine doesn’t consider our friendship to be, “a strain”, because I really am trying to better friend to him and all of my other friends in general. Regardless of our differences, I really do see him as a good friend and I hope he sees me in the same light.
Well, if you read all of that AND understood it AND didn’t get too offended, 2 cookies for you! Whew, I’m glad I got that complicatedness off of my chest. Now I can exhale and look forward to the weekend! 2.5 days of pure ridiculousness with my best friends and after the week I’ve had, I surly do need a “mini-vacation” from my day-to-day life.
Here’s to good friendships 
, may they be ever lasting.
jelainesays
