purging, of sorts

so, i've been wanting to write this blog for awhile. i just haven't known where to begin. even now, i don't know quite where to begin so let me start by saying this:

this blog has absolutely NO ill-intent. i'm not writing it hoping that the person i'm writing about will read it and feel horrible, or feel like i'm talking badly about her, or anything like that. i'm sure she won't even read it, and it's just as well. it's just something i've thought about a lot the last long while and as a writer, this is my way of purging it. blogging.


i kind of want to write about how someone who starts out as good for a person (and vice versa) ends up being someone who is poisonous for a person instead. how my best friend and i went from ridiculously close bff's to...well...i don't know what we are.


i've accepted that we are no longer friends. it's a good thing, i'll say that now. it's good that we're no longer friends but it wasn't always that way. the fact that it is that way is sad to me, but what's done is done.
for the first while after my best friend and i stopped talking, i tortured myself day and night over what went wrong. why did we act so (i know this sounds like a joke, but it's not lol) psycho around each other? why did we make each other needy, dependent and weak? why did we hang out all of the time even though it (felt) like we practically hated each other? when had we STARTED "hating" each other? time after time i pored over the last couple of years, trying to figure out what went wrong.

i factored in my depression, both of our job losses, things like that....but the number one reason i came across was when we moved in together two summers ago.


looking back, i have no idea why we thought it was a good idea at all. i'd only been married a matter of months, was deeply depressed, and jobless. derek was only making enough for us to barely get by. my friend made enough to get by easily. maybe we told ourselves it would save us money. i think truthfully for me, i didn't want to be alone. i knew if we moved in together that i wouldn't feel lonely when derek worked his swing shift job. and i felt that somehow, it would ease my confused feelings about marriage after having depression set in mere months after marrying the man i loved.

i don't know her reasons for wanting to move in with us, but i'm sure they were less weird than my own. so we decided to move in to a house that had enough room that we still thought we'd have our own space.


we were wrong.


weird things happened with jobs when we moved in, and my friend and i ended up working at the same dead-end place. we literally never had time apart. money grew tight, and as it did, resentment started building. i resented her for "making it harder" and i could tell she was resenting me. it seemed like we were both a little depressed now, we never left the house to do anything and ate ourselves sick all the time.

one day i was sitting out on the deck, before she decided to move out, and wondered, what the hell is happening with my best friend and i?


we didn't seem to enjoy hanging out anymore. we seemed to develop a dependence on the other that was weird. we ended up both losing our jobs and spent all day, every day doing nothing.



then, she moved out. at the time, i was mad when she did because i felt she'd left us in a hole financially, which even if it was the case....her decision was a wise one.



but after she moved out, we kept hanging out. it was me, i think. i was scared to lose my best friend even though we desperately needed space. we kept hanging out so much, it wasn't even fun anymore.
i'd always been a confrontational type before the depression. in the midst of it, i became totally non-confrontational. any hint of confrontation made me cry. she had never been very confrontational either, so between us....nothing was being said.
we resented each other because we wouldn't talk about things. about feeling like we were stuck hanging out with each other even when we didn't want to. about everything that was bad about orem. we never spoke about anything, so it began to build up and fester as our dependence on each other grew worse.


at some point, things grew broken beyond repair between us. i was certain that she pretty much hated me by the time we stopped talking. i felt like i might have even hated her a little, too.




but now that more time has gone by, i don't feel anything like that. i look back on that friendship and it's weird to me. it's tired. and it's sad. because we changed from being people who were great friends and good for each other to being horrible, passive-aggressive friends and people who were literally poisonous for one another.


what exactly happened? living together was a horrible idea. but i think the true death of the friendship started when we kept hanging out and didn't allow any space AFTER the fact. we should have. we should have yelled at each other or something, and gotten all of the bad feelings out. we should have stopped talking for awhile, just to take a breather. if we had, things probably could have been salvaged.


instead, we didn't. and i look back at myself when we were friends and shudder because i was such a needy, weird, depressed FREAK about everything. and somehow, we enabled that in each other. and for whatever reason, we couldn't seem to go back.


i've learned to be independent like i used to be now. i do things for myself instead of relying on someone else to help me. i have a job, i have routines and schedules and goals that i hold myself to. i'm a person again. an adult again.

i guess you learn the hard way, when seven years with someone is gone it's almost like a death. but i've learned so much, i wouldn't take it back, even if i wish sometimes that my friend and i could be friends the way we USED to be, when we cheered each other up, pushed each other to be better and were friends the way friends are MEANT to be.


really all i can hope now is that she maybe doesn't hate me. that her life has picked up and improved the way that mine has. and that one day, we both can look past the bitter end and remember the rest instead.



and let me add, i know this blog is really personal. that's fine. my blog is pretty much my journal, so i don't see the point of avoiding certain topics.