Friendship: A Long Sought After Ideal

I grew up believing in friendship, a friendship that lasted the tests of time.

Blame it on the 80s sitcoms of my youth, I suppose.

I believed that once you bonded and became friends, that friend, for the most part, was one you had for life. You would both grow older together, and things would change, the two of you (or group of you) would go through ups and downs in your relationship – hell, you may even stop being friends for a few years – but in the long run, that friend, that good friend, was there for life.

I believed that this kind of friendship wasn’t just someone that you spent time with in and out of school, someone you had fun with, but someone who was there for you through the highs and lows of life. And vice versa. I believed that this kind of friendship – and therefore good friends – were people you could share your innermost secrets with, people you could talk to about anything. I believed that these people would be there for you on the days you are the happiest… and on days when you needed someone to help you remember the good that is in you when you can’t see it yourself.

It didn’t take me long to realize that that kind of friendship doesn’t exist in this world.

I’m not saying I never had friends growing up that fit into that ideal, in one way or another. I had close friends, and still have good memories of the time that I spent with them as children, but I always had a lack of trust in people, a wall that caused me to be unable to share my true self with people. I’ve worn a mask for a very long time, so long that I don’t know where the mask ends and I begin, but that’s another story.

My first true best friend was a girl named Ellen. She showed me that I could do things I never even thought I could, and gave me the confidence to try. We never had a falling out, we never had a fight, we never *stopped* being friends. I just simply moved. We kept in touch for a little while, and then, as they do, things changed. I still think about her every once in awhile, wonder how she’s doing, but our friendship did not last the tests of time. It didn’t even last the six month mark of me moving away. It didn’t end dramatically, as you see in TV shows. We just stopped talking to each other. Maybe we just stopped having the time to do so. Who knows.

Things were lonely after that, for awhile. I never felt like I fit in… anywhere. Still don’t, if we’re being honest. I sort of made myself the outcast, if that makes any sense. I preferred books while the girls I met preferred boys. I wasn’t good in big groups of people, not at the time. I just preferred to disappear and watch people interact, rather than deal with them myself. I remember creating stories in my head of the conversations they were having based on their body language and the looks on their faces. Those stories were always more interesting than what was really happening.

It didn’t help that I went to private schools, but at the same time, I wouldn’t have changed that for the world. Everyone seemed to be so rich and put together, and I was not poor, but always seemed to be floundering to figure out who I was, where my place was, what I wanted my future to hold. I had my first crush and my first heartbreak… and I dealt with it all alone. There was no confiding in someone in the locker room after gym class, or talking into the early morning hours at a sleepover. I don’t even remember seeing these people outside of school, other than church and the occasional birthday party.

My next best friend was unexpected. Because of issues I wasn’t privy to at the time, my sister and I were taken out of our private school and put into public school. I remember the kids in school telling me that, when I got to public school, I was going to get beaten up, because that’s what public school kids do, beat up random kids. In my head, I knew it was going to be worse because the school was bigger and if I couldn’t fit in at my current school, there was no way I was going to be able to fit in there. My seventh grade brain decided that, if I was talking, if my mouth was moving, that no one would be able to punch me in my mouth, because, if someone was going to punch me, clearly it would be in my mouth. (Note: They could still very well punch me in the mouth, even if it was moving. And why would I assume that they would punch me in the mouth only?!) I convinced myself that I could do this, that I had the opportunity to start a new school and be different, be someone else, with a better backstory and everything, because no one would know the truth. I planned it for weeks and I remember sitting in the gym, in this long line of kids (probably longer in my memory than it was in real life) talking. I mean TALKING… which was not something I was really known for doing until this moment. I made up funny stories and I cracked jokes and I made some friends.

That’s when I met Angela. She was my best friend, like how I expected best friends to be. She gave me her phone number that day and I was so excited – I honestly don’t remember exchanging phone numbers with anyone before that. That was usually left to the parents to deal with, so this was the first friend I made on my own. We had some classes together, we hung out together, we had the same lunch so we got to eat together. It was awesome. She was the kind of person that I had always wanted to be – loud, outgoing, funny, confident… and people just gravitated to her. You would have never known she wasn’t one of the cool kids. I tried being just like her, even long after our friendship ended.

And it did. Dramatically. But not until high school. I still think about it, on occasion, my brain never letting me forget the bad memories, wondering if there were signs that I should have seen before that day, but I can’t think of any. She rode my bus that afternoon, something she hardly ever did, going to spend time at a mutual friend’s house, a friend that did ride the bus. I was actually excited to see her because I hadn’t seen her all day. But she didn’t sit next to me. Instead, she sat in front of me, the mutual friend behind me, and they made sure no one sat next to me. Had I been worldly, had I ever been in a fight before, I would have known that this is bad news. I had this really uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach as the bus started to leave the parking lot, and it wasn’t long into the ride before our mutual friend was threatening me. I looked to Angela for help, and realized that it was not my side she was on. To this day, I still don’t fully understand why things went the way that they did. The mutual friend believed that I had spread a rumor about her, something that apparently only I knew, except I didn’t know. But neither would listen. They went on to say that the mutual friend had written me a letter about something that had happened between her and her father, and I had shared the contents of the letter – a letter I never saw – with our friend group and it had been spread from there. I have never been so scared in my life because I knew, in a fight situation, there was no way I was surviving, especially two-on-one, with both of the girls being much bigger than me. When we got to the mutual friend’s bus stop, the driver made them get off, no matter how much they argued with her about them going to my house to work on a project. She wasn’t moving her bus until they got off. I was so relieved. I was the last stop on the bus, and the bus driver confided in me when we were alone that she heard what was going on and would protect me. She also told me that she would be letting the principle know. I don’t know what happened after that (I never told my mom), but the two never spoke to me again.

Well, I can’t say never. I never saw the mutual friend again, but a few years later, after I had moved on to a different school, different home, Angela and I were back in contact with each other, though I don’t remember how. (This was long before Facebook.) We attempted our friendship again. And again after that. And again after that. It never… worked out. Mainly because it was never the same. We hung out and had fun times, but I could never trust her again, not after what happened. In fact, we’re still in contact, and every time she calls me her “bestie” I just want to scream. No, really I want to ask her why that happened all those years ago, I want to know what I supposedly told, I want to know how she could believe that about me, and there’s a part of me that wants an apology, even all these years later, though I know it will never come, even if I did ask for it. We’re supposed to forgive and forget, but she stole something from me. She stole the little bit of trust I had, the little bit of belief I had in friendships.

But it wasn’t just her… because I still had hope in finding someone who would renew my faith in people.

Around the time that this altercation happened on the bus, my father passed away, and that was something else I dealt with alone. My best friend was too busy hating me because of a lie someone else told, and my other friends? They didn’t know what to say… so they said nothing. Everyone, including teachers, avoided me at school. No one even acknowledged me.

We moved again, this time to get away from the memories we saw every day. And again I made some friends. And after awhile, some best friends. Four, to be exact. If they had been one person, they would have been the perfect best friend. Melissa, Erin, Julianne, and Austin. Each one fulfilled different best friend needs. But none of the four were people I could actually trust completely. I always felt like the three girls were closer to each other than they were to me, and I found out a couple of years after I graduated from high school that I was right. I was a year older, so they had time to be friends without me, and during an argument that one of them started, the other two ganged up on me as well. I was told, very specifically, that the only reason they had been my friend at all was because they felt sorry for me, that it made them look good to be friends with someone who needed friendship so badly. It hurt to find out that they never cared about me in the first place, hurt even more when they each decided to dramatically – and publicly – end their friendships with me. My friendship with Austin ended as well, just without the public humiliation (thank goodness). He chose to stay away from me because he knew my opinion on drugs. We tried the friendship thing again a couple of times, but he always just disappeared. (I realize now that my two actual best friends in high school weren’t these four at all.) An interesting fact: the three girls are still very good friends, with the kind of friendships that I always thought I had with them.

I think the worst end of a friendship was with a group of people I considered family. It was a weekend retreat for the kids of separated, divorced, and widowed parents. It was the only place I ever felt like I really fit in. Until I didn’t.

I looked forward to these weekends for months, and even if I had to fight with my mother to be able to go, I went. I thought these people understood. The people that I was close to, I really trusted them. In the small group sessions, I shared things with these people, talked about what was really going on in my life, and showed a lot more of the real me during those weekends than I ever thought I would. They helped me deal with the grief of losing my father, and with his death, the loss of my family.

One of the things that I wanted the most was to be able to share my story with the big group. I had it all written out in my journal and was really impressed with the level of honesty in my words and the growth that I had experienced coming to the retreats, but there was an excuse every time on why I couldn’t be one of those people. It bothered me that the reasons I couldn’t share, were reasons that other people were encouraged to share, but I kept trying to be better at handling my grief, sure that one day he would see just how much I had grown and learned. At the same time, I no longer felt close to the person who ran it, no longer felt I could trust him. My mother told me several times that she didn’t think I should go anymore, that she didn’t like the changes that were being made or the behavior of some people, that she didn’t like how I was treated, but I refused to listen to her, believing that I couldn’t survive without these people – they were my friends and I needed them.

When I learned the truth, as always in life, I learned it the hard way. I had argued with my mother, who had signed me up to go, but again wanted me to change my mind about going. This time I ran away. To Angela and her mom. My mother knew that I would be at the retreat, so she contacted the man in charge, not to tell him I couldn’t go, not to cancel my place in the retreat, not even to get me in trouble, but to confide in him that she was concerned about me. She asked him to have me call her when I got there. Her words were for him and him alone. By the time I arrived that Friday, everyone knew. That included parents, that included people who had never been there before. I was ostracized. Friends I had been close to and had known for years had nothing to do with me. I was overlooked in small groups, where we were all supposed to have the chance to talk, and overlooked in big group activities. The only time the man in charge spoke to me was Friday when he told me to call my mom, and again Saturday morning when I had to walk to breakfast by myself because he lectured me for 45 minutes on my behavior. He wouldn’t let me say a word, didn’t care to hear what happened, just kept repeating how disappointed in me he was “once again.” (Once again. That was hard for me to handle. He’d never shared that he was disappointed in me before.) It didn’t matter that he wasn’t sure he wanted me to come back again. I knew then that I wouldn’t be. Especially in the end, where we each throw a ball of yarn to another person that we have connected with, creating this big web of connection, and I was the only one not included.

I have a friend from that group – or I should say that I am currently connected on Facebook with one of those people from that retreat. We had been close once. I highly doubt we ever will be again. She likes to talk about herself, how perfect her life is, how she’s finally with the guy that she had loved so long ago (from the retreat, who broke her heart at one point, cheating on her with another girl from the retreat – a guy that neither girl was interested in until I told them I had a crush on him, all those years ago). She still is friends with a lot of the people that I was once close to, a lot of people that were part of that last weekend. She was part of that last weekend.

I’ve had friends, on and off, since then. I have friends that I consider part of my family, friends that I’ve known since I graduated from high school and some from high school. I have friends. I don’t have best friends. I don’t even have true friends. I just have people I know that, at one point in life, I cared about. Quite a few are people that I don’t care to know anymore, but I keep them because of some belief that I have to, that I’m a bad person if I choose to end the friendship, even if it’s just quietly blocking them on social media (like I did to someone yesterday) and not thinking about it again.

I have lost all trust in people. I have lost all belief in people… and friendships. It was stolen from me by people who only cared about themselves, and in only caring about themselves, they were able to destroy the people they once called friend, even if they never cared about the friendship in the first place.

Maybe I just expected too much from people. Maybe I still do.

It’s a hard thing to deal with – and very sad – when you realize that you actually have no one you can talk to about things. No one you can trust. No one you can be yourself around. No one. It is the most lonely I have ever felt.