I Love You, Man
I’m starting to really hate my phone. Well, not my phone, Timehop. That poxy app. It’s almost my birthday, so you can imagine the kind of shit it’s showing me right now. Parties, lots of them – my 18th, 19th, 25th, joint birthday and coming home from the other side of the world parties. So many parties. So many people. I had so many friends. I had quite the active social life and I remember having lots of fun. But right now, I’m sat in my bedroom, crying.
Funny how life changes, eh?
The girl who had so many friends she couldn’t even remember all of their names now has barely any friends at all. I’m trying to work out if I’m just a bitch who pushes everyone away or if I’ve just been really unlucky and keep choosing to have people in my life who aren’t worth the time of day? I do know this much: if I were to get married tomorrow (which I’m not), it would be like that movie where Paul Rudd has no friends and needs to find a best man for this wedding. I can never remember the name. Let me just Google it …
“I Love You, Man!”
That’s it! That’s me. I wouldn’t even have enough friends to fill a table at a wedding. I’m like the girl who has no friends. When did that happen? I feel so unlikeable right now. Waaaah.
Anxiety has crippled most of my friendship circles. Too many of my male friends tried to fuck me after I lost five stone and learned how to dress and contour, and now I don’t trust any of them.
My female friends think I’m a bitch who’s trying to fuck their husbands/boyfriends, and most of them also hate my honesty. Very few of them make any time for me these days. I’ve moved around so often most of my friends are in weird and wonderful places around the world, so keeping in touch is difficult. Not that I had many friends left after my stints in those places I lived. Deutschland, for example, left me with relatively ZERO friends because not only did I not fit in, my husband beat and abused me until I isolated myself. It’s really difficult to have friends when you’ve always got a bunch of bruises you need to cover up and you’re calling in sick at work or have been signed off because of another black eye. It’s kinda hard to get the girls together for a good time, you know?
And then we had the other side of the world. All of those friends live a minimum of 24 hours worth of travel away, and they’ve all had babies and stuff too. I have nothing in common with them now. I had mini-rant on Twitter the other day about a friend who doesn’t feel like much of a friend anymore, getting to where she needs to be and letting the people she no longer needs go in the process. Everything seems to go the right way for women like that, with husbands who support them and earn enough money for two people, a beautiful family in tow.
Some chicks have all the luck.
Lemme tell you something – I am NOT one of them.
I work my ass off. Since I don’t have kids yet, it seems a shame to not go and grab my career with both hands while I can. That’s what I did when I quit my day job and became a full-time freelance … me? What am I? What do I do? I do so many things that the term ‘writer’ doesn’t quite cover it. But I work a lot. From home. How am I meant to fit in a social life around that? Where do I find new friends?
And it’s not like I can just jump in on the party scene these days. I don’t drink and I can’t stand pubs. They bring me out in anxiety so bad it actually makes me want to cry. Sometimes, I actually do cry. Real tears. Overwhelming people-claustrophobia. Proper panic. The coke-snortin’, MDMA-droppin’, Jaegermeister-guzzling party girl really has turned her life around. She’s now a successful (ish) stoner who doesn’t drink and replaced a social life with lots of work. But I LOVE what I do. Wholeheartedly. I get paid to do the thing I love the most. That’s not a job; that’s a dream come true. It is for me, anyway. But have I sacrificed my friends in the process? My social life? Some of my past relationships … ?
I remember my mama saying something to me a few years back when I was contemplating moving to the other side of the world with a boyfriend I’d known for less than 6 months. [Big Love.] She said this:
“You’re such a likable girl, you can make friends anywhere. You always have done. Don’t be worried, go and have your adventures.”
She was right too, I could make friends anywhere. I *could*. I DID move to the other side of the world and I DID make new friends.
So what happened to me?
Between the cervical shit and the bowel stuff and the anxiety and depression, plus moving halfway around the world and back a few times, bad relationship after bad relationship, and generally feeling like I wasn’t good enough, I’ve pushed all my friends away.
I told my work colleague her husband was an alcoholic and I didn’t want my boyfriend to be around her boyfriend while he was like that.
I didn’t keep in touch with any of my Canadian friends half as much as I wanted to, as I should have done. I never sent the care boxes I said I would. I never wrote the handwritten love letters I kept saying I’d write.
That was all me – I did that. Or, you know, I didn’t do that. I didn’t bother. I was too busy or too sick or too anxious/stressed/depressed to leave my house for weeks at a time.
I don’t talk to any of my old work colleagues now and I genuinely thought I’d be talking to some of those folks forever. To be fair, I fucked the one guy I probably would’ve classed as my closest friend from that time, so I really do cause my own sodding problems.
Eye roll so hard.
SO HARD.
And then there’s Bestie …
I lost him because I didn’t fuck him. I didn’t just lose him, though, I lost a lot of people I cared a great deal for, that tiny social circle I had left. I didn’t even realise I gave a shit about most of them until after they’d gone. Funny how that works, eh? But I see those wedding photos and then more wedding photos and I’m sad I wasn’t included. I know they’re going to start making babies soon and I won’t be around for any of that, either. It’s quite sad, really. I watched these people meet, fall in love, plan their engagements, weddings, everything … and now I’m nothing to them and they’re nothing to me.
I’m really struggling. It’s 20-odd degrees outside, not a cloud in the sky, glorious blue skies and scorching summer rays. I’m locked in my bedroom with the curtains closed, puffy-eyed and surrounded by snotty tissues, feeling like an ungrateful cunt, I must add, because I have a wonderful job that I love, a beautiful boyfriend who treats me like a queen (most of the time), and a life that most people would kill for.
I have so much to be thankful for.
So why aren’t I?
And where are those people who are meant to stick around and give me that sharp slap in the face at times like these?
