Inevitability
All my life, I have been the type of person who puts other people ahead of themselves. I'm too nice to be mean and too generous to be selfish.
So, I have spent my entire life letting others go ahead of me. I have tried my hardest not to rely on other people to help me emotionally. I don’t speak to my family about issues I have. I don’t speak to my friends and the small minority of friends I have spoken to don't know the full picture. I don’t want to drag them down. I don’t want to hold them back while I sit and cry on their shoulder, when they could be doing what they want. I don’t want to inconvenience them is the point I'm trying to get at I suppose.
I have found myself recently in the position of having kept my emotions and feelings inside for so long that I am nearly overflowing with emotion. I recently wrote a poem about a night that I found myself in and the implications it had. I showed it to a friend who said she really enjoyed it and thought that I had done a really good job. I then showed it to my brother who said it was the most self-loathing piece of poetry he’d ever read. I decided not to show anyone else the poem and proceeded to a dark, quiet part of the house and willed myself to cry so I could release some of my emotion while simultaneously trying my hardest not to so that the residents of the house, my brother and friend included would not hear me.
When I’m not feeling great, I talk to my friends, about anything really. I do this to reassure myself that the people I consider to be friends find me mildly interesting and think I’m a decent person. So, I decided to text four of my closest friends asking them how they are (another idiosyncrasy of mine being to always take concern of someone else’s wellbeing before my own). Two of them replied and so as you would expect I replied back. They didn’t text back again for the rest of the night. The other two didn’t respond at all. These four people I shall soon be living with.
With this setback, I decided to try and talk to a friend on Facebook so I could talk to a friend about how I’m feeling. I looked at the list of friends that were available to chat. I could only see one that I would want to talk to, a girl from my Drama degree in University. Having said “Hello”, I waited for a response. None came. I waited a little longer while checking my e-mails to discover that I had no new ones to read, or even to send to the junk folder. I decided that my friend was obviously not going to reply and gave up trying to talk to someone in the hope of releasing some of this emotion.
By not having someone to talk to, this actually acts as not only one slap in the face but two. The first comes from not having the ability to talk to a friend about how I’m feeling and subsequently means that the emotion inside of me will continue to build up and will come closer to overflowing. I dread to think what happens when there isn’t any space left. The second slap in the face comes from the fact that by having my friends not respond, it leads me to believe that they don’t want to talk to me at the moment. This, as I’m sure you can guess, is not a nice feeling. Actually, it’s an awful feeling. So, instead I had to soldier on trying to keep up appearances that I’m fine so as to not inconvenience people or give the impression that I’m too weak to carry on.
I hope you don’t find this writing to be self-loathing as I now find myself in the awkward position of needing a friend to talk to about everything which goes completely against my nature of not wanting to talk to people about my problems so as to not put them in an awkward position. It’s a funny word, awkward. Awkward. It’s almost like it’s an awkward word. Awk-word. What was I talking about? Oh well, it’s probably not important anyway. Speak to you later.
Info » Family & Relationships » Friendships
2 Comments – Post a comment
Tyezer
Commented 16 months ago - 18th January 2011 - 12:21pm
I feel like this sometimes. There have been times when I've really needed to talk to someone and have tried calling loads of people and just got their answerphones. Or I've text my friends and they've said that they're out with their boyfriends. It's not their fault, in fact if I said 'I've been crying for the last few hours, I need to talk' they would probably have cancelled their plans. But I couldn't say that to them, I couldn't open up that much, I didn't want to burden them.
I don't know your friends, but it's probably not that they don't want to talk to you. They just don't know what you're going through. I sometimes don't text my friends back, not because I don't care, it's just because at that time I have something else on. If I knew they needed me, I'd be there. But sometimes people need it spelling out to them. I hope you start feeling better soon. It always gets better :)
Stormer007
Commented 15 months ago - 3rd February 2011 - 04:00am
Hey, thanks :) I've come to realise since, that I'm still gonna feel like this no matter what. But it's just a case of realising that my friends actually do care about me, even when it seems liek they don't. I've since uploaded that poem I was talkign about btw. I decided it took me too long to write to not show anyone! Thanks =)