I often talk about how life has taken me down an interesting pathway and though I've lost friends along the way, I can't regret the choices I've made. I stand by that statement, except for one person. It's been over two years since I have last spoken to a former friend and I often wish I had done things differently. I've gone through phases of making excuses about why our friendship ended, blamed myself, blamed everything out there; and after two years I've finally figured out why everything happened.
The background:
My brother was my best friend, it felt like we were a team and I was always so proud to be his little sister. Growing up in a family where I was the youngest by years, I loved my oldest brother and older sister, but there was such an age difference that they were more like siblings than friends. As the years go by and I get less annoying (i.e. older) we've gotten closer, but my brother Colin was my best friend growing up, and everyone knew that. When Colin became estranged with our family I can't say it felt like a piece of me died or that things would never be right again, it just set forward into motion a series of events that would take me a long time to recover from.
My senior year I found myself at odds with my father about moving back to Colorado, binge drinking three to four nights a week, sleeping through classes and unmotivated to do anything. But people thought I was fun. When the year ended and I was done with St. Thomas, reality set in. Trying to find a job as a Psych major was downright hard. I worked at Club Monaco to pay for the bills, fought with my parents almost constantly, got into some debt, continued to party, and just was on a downward trajectory. The place I worked made me feel like I was ugly and fat, which only further contributed to how badly I felt about my current situation. So I drank.
Somewhere along the line I stopped drinking as much, stopped going out as often, and stopped being that person who laughes the loudest and is excited about doing things. Somewhere along the line, I went from living my life out of control, to barely living. I had no energy, I was a negative person, a shell of a person that I once was. The problem with being situationally depressed is that you think that you're doing a good job of managing it. You think 'Well, this really sucks right now but I'll get myself out of this soon.' and you honestly believe that your friends know what you're going through even though you tell them nothing. You start to say no to going out and soon after your friends no longer ask you.
I had a friend, a best friend even, who avoided confrontation like the plague. Not that she was afraid of confrontation, just that she believed there were more pleasant ways for things to get taken care of. One night we went out for dinner and she told me she was worried about me, she thought I needed to seek help, and that she missed the old me. When you're in survival mode and someone you love lets you know you're not fooling anyone it's a shock to the system, and not the good kind. It's not the self-examing kind that kicks your butt into gear, it's the kind that makes you resent the person who told you the very advice you needed to hear. It took me well over two years to realize this, two years to finally be grateful for the advice.
That conversation was the beginning of the end of our friendship. I began to resent my friend and became even more depressed. I'd then spend another year in a worse situation than the one I was already currently in. Being baited and switched by my former employer/landlord into a housing situation that was not financially feasible for me made climbing out of the hole I was in at that time near impossible. It's been a year since I've lived there and the financial reprocussions are still taking a toll on me, I'm still digging my way out but I'm almost there. And I'm proud of myself for doing it on my own.
Last year while I was slowly beginning the healing process I found something I loved. While running a website took all my time and energy, I buried myself in it anyway. Hockey was my healing process, the thing I needed to let take over my life to finally get back to being me. I started being more like my old self, going to concerts by myself if no one cared to go, meeting up with friends, traveling the country, being adventurous. It was slowly starting to feel normal again, despite various other speed bumps along the way.
Finally this Spring something changed. My mother reached out to my estranged brother and his wife. The communication was slow but optimistic. Looking back at the entire situation that led to estrangement, it all seems so trivial compared to the joy of family but at the time felt larger than life. Hindsight isn't 20/20, it's about looking at things with a fresh perspective, from outside the situation rather than in the midst of the chaos. And hindsight told my mother that she needed to reach out. And soon she sent me emails that made me cry, emails of her communication with my brother and his wife and how much my brother missed me. Just as much as I missed him, but the embarrassment kept him from reaching out. I've taken a lot of heat from family members who don't believe I should even let my brother back into my life, but they don't know what I've gone through these past six years. And they really don't know how instrumental this has all been to getting me back to being me.
This past July marked a change in my life when it felt like I wasn't pretending to be happy any longer, but was actually really happy. My loud laugh often fills the room I'm in, my sarcasm is back in full force and there's somewhat of a spring in my step. I finally feel like me again, but there's still something missing. I never got to apologize to my friend who loved me enough to tell me she was concerned. The friend I thanked by being an awful friend, pushing her away and ignoring her advice.
Lizzy Freeman, I'm sorry I didn't listen to you when you voiced your concern. I miss you every single day.
