no boys allowed in the room!!!!

* this morning i got a text that read "so sorry, looking for time to call you back but i just don't have it. so consumed these next few weeks. soon!"
* my heart broke for real because i realized that i had been demoted

:(

I...dislike cold, hard reality so I try not to think about what priority level I am to my friends at any given moment. I also have enough of them in different stages of their lives that I can sort of afford to be less important to a lot of them if I can find a couple who have time for me in the near future or whatever. If they all left me, or I felt like they were leaving me, at the same time and I ran out of community to splash around in when I needed it, I would have no way of recharging or rebuilding my resources. I'm sorry. :(

yeah there's nothing i can do to make her want to talk to me more so i just have to accept it but it stings

A few weeks ago I was supposed to do something w a friend I don't see enough, and we both had the night "free" but also both had a bunch of *lyfe* obligations like studying, laundry, getting our shit together. After a few queries, we agreed to give each other the gift of time to put our lives in order because that pressure and those needs are real. Because we talked it over and were both agreed, it felt like an expression of our caring for each other.

This is not The Answer to anything, it was just a solution we found on that one occasion.

ach i'm sorry LL, that would bum me out too!!

plus the extra level of mental havoc that reaching out and being backburnered adds, I'm not very good at handling stuff like that personally

kinda long tl;dr sobstory here, boo hoo friendships sorry but I need to get this out of my head

i am grappling with the possiblity that I may have officially lost a friendship with a girl I've been friends with since 7th Grade. top of the list, my favorite person in the world. she was a bit harder to reach after she had kids, but nothing I couldn't handle. she went through a divorce about 3 years ago, and since then seems to have pulled away from both me and our other mutual friend. she's not an email person, is kinda hard to stay in touch with from a distance generally anyway.

2 years ago when I was home I called & left a bunch of voicemails, Hi I'm in town for 2 weeks I'd love to see you etc...dropped by her house but no-one was home...ended up dropping a letter in her mailbox the day I left saying I was sad to see her. never heard anything. and this last time, I was only home for such a short time I didn't even make plans to catch up with her. and then I felt horrible so I wrote her a long snailmail letter about a month ago telling her how much I want to stay friends, in whatever form that takes etc.

but I don't know if I'll ever hear back. I don't want to think about the likelihood that I won't. i just wish I knew what was in her heart, if she's going through some shit or if we're just moving to the deep-freeze phase of the long distance friendship

the thing is we stayed tight through SO much shit. SO much. that I just can't get down with the idea that this is, possibly, it. I dunno if I can give up yet.

idk.

*sad to see her = *sad not to see her

jeez

all that makes me sound like a 'she's just not that into you' thing and that I'm crazystalking someone who doesnt' want to be friends

it's not exactly that way

there's more to it but yeah just :/

I hear you. I lost my first "best friend" by moving to NYC. We were inseparable, roommates and confidantes who needed no one else, for years. We thought no matter how much time passed, our connection would stay the same; that we'd be aunties to each other's kids. For about a year we talked on the phone on and off. Then stuff happened, and we stopped. In later years I left her a couple of messages, tried to get in touch when I was in town, but no response.

Finally I found her on fb and swung a visit to her two holidays ago. It was brief, coffee and an hour at her house. She was amiable but distracted, friendly but missing some emotional engagement. I thought catching up was important, but it was more important to her to take a nap before her night shift as a nurse. She has a husband and two kids and owns a house in our college town, and that life is more real than being friends with me (since I'm just going to leave again anyway?). It's probably healthier for her to have boundaries and a clear view of her daily needs but I def felt put in my place low on the list.

tl;dr, just...I feel that feeling too. It's weird-sad. I stopped trying, we're both still alive and part of the universe and maybe our stories will intersect again, maybe not. At the very least we changed each other. The fact of our history isn't erased by it not lasting forever....

:/

I wanted her to do more with her life than marry some Midwestern dweeb (he's a dweeb) and never leave our ultra-conservative town and not have any friends who weren't religious. I know it's hateful and patronizing of me to indulge these thoughts but she could have developed so much more interestingly.

yep

That reads horribly--I should say that she was beautiful and iconoclastic and coquettish and confident and all the boys I liked liked her instead of me. She was a shining thing. Maybe she burned herself out, I don't know.

i totally get what you mean

getting old/adulthood kinda blows in that regard

the stuff you want for each other as teenagers seems so much more exciting than what irl usually doles out

Like marrying Leonard Cohen.

Somewhere on a 16-year old mixtape I have a live version of "There's a Light Beyond These Woods, Mary Margaret" by NG with a long monologue in front involving Mary Margaret and a truck stop jukebox, and I can't even think about it without crying.

my sad violin of lost friendship is so loud that the hum has turned into a drone that may occasionally shift but never stops
today really got to me because of all i have been through with this person, and it left me feeling really burnt. i channeled that energy positively, which is good, but nothing has changed. i just don't feel bad about it atm.

maybe it's a little consolation to think to keep in mind that there'a a good chance it's not you, it's them - LL, maybe your friend is suffering some postpartem depression, minor or major, and is really struggling to stay on top of things? and maybe a similar thing in your case, VG, esp if your friend is no longer in contact with mutual friends, and had gone through a divorce?

yeah otm

that's kinda why I am not giving up. i sense that kernel is in there somewhere. spidey sense sorta

I wish for the women I love to always get their needs met and feel supported. It sucks that this is not within our control and yet affects us so profoundly. Other people, amirite?

Xp - Maybe! But previously she'd have talked with me about it, hence my demotion. :(

hard enough being us without projecting ourselves onto other people, and yet

Btw I am growing an old pot of chives that still struggle along (provenance unknown), some basil shoots, some rocket that is ROCKETING upwards and needs to be thinned out, two boxwood shrubs that appear to be about to flower? Plus outside I have some flower seeds and bulbs and garden plants that I hope will do better this year than last.

Also when I eat a scallion, I soak the white end in water for a couple of days and then plant it, so now when I want scallions I just snip them off with scissors and they grow back incredibly fast.

idk I'm not sure if this makes any sense but I expect more of a spouse than I do of friends, and this impacts my expectations of friends because I have a spouse? is this fucked up? I dunno it is late and I have take a ton of benadryl because apparently I am allergic to Alabama SURPRISE

I wanted to clarify that my melodramatic drone post was collateral noise, not caused by this incident.

Time zones suck. It's always a little bit of a lost and lonely feeling when this thread sits empty and forlorn all day, then when I'm asleep it magically springs back to life, and dies away by the time I'm awake.

I think it's kind of strange to me, the idea of the "lifelong best friend" because I moved so much as a child, went to so many different schools, continued to move so much even as an adult. There are 2 maybe 3 friends I am even still in contact with, from before the age of 25? (And they are not necessarily the people, that had you asked me, at that age, who will I still be friends with in 20 years.) But those contacts are very sporadic, and dependent on me going to another country. Being the one who moves is hard, but I'm sure that being the one who stays behind is hard, too, I'm sure. Because they also change, move in a different direction.

I dunno; this is one of the things that I have been working on with my shrink for the past 2 years. Confronting the expectation that friends should be "permanent" with the reality that every aspect of life is transitory. There are friends you have only while you are in a specific phase of your life, and you both move onto other phases. You have friends that you focused around an activity, like a job or a club or a hobby, and when that is over, the friendship ends. (This has been the hard one for me - when so many of my friendships have been based around bands, accepting the fact that the band breakup often means that the friendship is over, and all the work you put into it is now for nothing, that's hard.)

There may be some truth to the idea that a friend who is too busy with a baby to see you might have post-partum depression, or that a friend who had a divorce 3 years ago might be struggling. Or there may not be. I really would not be too quick to "medicalise" things which may just be life changes. It's nothing you've done wrong, it's nothing they've done wrong, it's just that the shapes of your lives have changed so that they don't quite fit any more.

I grew up in a family that was very far-flung, and people going off to and visiting back from colonies all over the world, and when people were in town for a week or two, you pulled out all the stops to make the visit happen while they were there. But there are many people for whom this is not the usual, that trying to fit in out of town visitors during a constrained amount of time is an imposition and an interruption, and you have moved on, and they have moved on. Someone coming back from out of town with the expectation that "you should have done something more with your life" is kinda... I would feel defensive and distracted being around that person. (Not to mention, if you make a mistake as a nurse on a night shift because you haven't had enough sleep, someone could die.) Sorry, that sounds harsher than I intended. People grow in different directions, have different priorities, and they are allowed to.

It's important, as you get older, to have friends who remember who you both were when you were young. But if the only connection is remembering who you were when you were young, and there is no connection of who you are, now, then that's a different kind of friendship. I'm going to stop typing now, and spend the rest of the morning feeling apologetic about this post.

I grew up in a family that was very far-flung, and people going off to and visiting back from colonies all over the world, and when people were in town for a week or two, you pulled out all the stops to make the visit happen while they were there. But there are many people for whom this is not the usual, that trying to fit in out of town visitors during a constrained amount of time is an imposition and an interruption, and you have moved on, and they have moved on.

This is so otm and I am experiencing it now! On my crappy phone otherwise could post a huge post about this whole thing

Well, I'm glad it resonates because I feel like I'm being a constant stream of negativity ITT, and I don't really like being a stream of constant negativity.

I kinda wanna be like "happy things! gardening! cute boys in suits! sunshine!" and not... like I'm being right now.

no BB that was an A+ post, v insightful thank you!!

BB I liked yr posts and man if you think you're being negative you should see the things I have been thinking but not posting itt. e.g. I have been... very bad at staying in touch with friends, so I've been having ~thoughts~ about the best female friend conversation, but they don't need posted. Also thoughts about my ovaries but yeah TMI and TMwhining so eh.

i.o. do you snip your planted scallions off and leave the white bit in the ground or do you need to pull, snip, soak, replant every time?

I tried to regrow some scallions once but I didn't know what I was doing and left them unattended in water for too long. Plants are a foreign language to me, I need everything spelt out and then I invent some ambiguity in the instructions that nobody else would ever even think of and worry about it. So apologies if the above q is in that category.

I'm experimenting with just leaving them in the dirt and cutting off what I need. Seems to be working okay so far. They don't grow back as big as supermarket ones but I assume those are grown under controlled hydroponic conditions etc and let grow for longer.

I just put the leftover stubs in a little water and on the kitchen bench - they just grow and grow!

I think it's totally ok to negative-vent on this thread , I'm certainly not complaining

Also: the one female friends I hang out with here is probably moving back to the UK soon :/

This is making me feel very lucky as I have 5-6 really awesome close female friends. I don't have hardly any male friends anymore!

Green shoots! The first of my greens has peeked its little heads up into the sun!

It never fails to amaze me how I can scatter a bunch of seeds into some dirt, and a few days later, there are shoots and then after a week or two, there is FOOD for free, coming out of the GROUND. This is just one of the best things in the world.

Also, my apple trees are in blossom, which is possibly one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life. (You can't imagine what I'm going to be like when they start to sprout actual apples.)

I grew up next to an 80-y-o apple orchard and climbed in their gnarled and dying branches as a matter of course, I'm right there with ya.

lol BB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE

would it be rude and/or gross to disrupt the idyllic gardening talk with the latest in the date rapist playing my co-op saga?

Nope.

Yeah, go ahead, I think we can handle both.

So, before I did or said anything about the situation, a mutual friend who is also dating the roommate of another co-op member, contacted the co-op member who was putting on the show (not her bf's roommate), and told him that the date rapist shouldn't be allowed to play and basically said what in orbit and BB said in this thread as reasons why.

I woke up one morning to a voicemail from my friend (the victim) about it -- that the guy putting on the show was a bit skeptical about the mutual friend's accusations and position on what should be done. So I called her, and I told her that I wanted to talk to her first before saying anything, and that I felt gross having that guy play. But I didn't want to broach the situation with the co-op until talking to her to see how she felt about it, and how much she felt comfortable having other people know about the situation, like, if she even wanted her name mentioned. So she said that she would understand if the co-op let him play, but that she would feel better if he wasn't allowed to play. My friend actually goes to shows there and has played there several times, so it isn't just a hypothetical thing.

So I contacted the guy putting on the show and told him that everything the mutual friend said was true, and that I agreed with her, but it should be something brought up to the whole co-op group for discussion, because I could tell that the guy felt uncomfortable making the decision on his own -- because he's one of those guys that doesn't want to be an asshole.

Anyway, it led to a long discussion, where a lot of the unfortunate standard things got said: "Well, was he convicted? He doesn't show up in the sex offenders registry.", "She used to date a good friend of mine and is a total whackjob," "I have had friends get wrongfully accused of rape that got blackballed out of scenes, so I am uncomfortable siding with the victim." "None of us really know what happened, so I don't feel like judging this guy."

I don't even know how to deal with guys that say things like that. I mean, my response is just to start screaming about rape apologists, and obviously that gets absolutely nowhere. Maybe some other people will have some better ideas about how to actually get through to these idiots. I mean, I'm at the point where I just post Shakesville's Rape Culture 101 and leave the conversation if I have to say anything. Because I don't have the energy to counter those kinds of things. But this is a point where they need to be countered and called out for the bullshit that they are, but I don't know how.

Ugh. What was the outcome? Is he going to play?

Also: "because he's one of those guys that doesn't want to be an asshole." Not being an asshole to a date rapist means being an asshole to the person he date raped.

Also: "because he's one of those guys that doesn't want to be an asshole." Not being an asshole to a date rapist means being an asshole to the person he date raped.

Yeah, exactly! So I told him to contact my friend (the victim), and they apparently had a long conversation about "rape culture" and all of the issues, and while the co-op was deadlocked in terms of yes or no (there were men and women on both sides), the guy decided not to have the date rapist play. So I felt good about it, though less good about some of the things my fellow co-op members said, esp. the one about the victim being crazy. By the time I saw that response, the discussion had progressed and digressed so I didn't end up saying, "Maybe the fact she has mental health issues led to her dating this guy and being in the situation where the rape occurred, but claiming that it was her fault because she was crazy is like blaming the victim of a stray bullet from a ghetto drive-by for being poor."

I'm sorry, I can't even.

But I am glad that the dude is now not playing.

Not just for the victim's benefit, but for the idea that: these kinds of actions have real-life consequences, which will hopefully put the thought into other dudes' heads that this is not a thing to be doing. Even if the victim is "crazy". Sigh. I just... no.

I mean, when you get into the actual statistics, and the idea that women with mental health issues are actually statistically *more* likely to have been raped (possibly because NO ONE WILL BELIEVE THEM) then that whole "~bitches be crazy!!!1~" argument becomes more and more sickening.

Argh. But I am glad that a deadlock meant that the dude is not playing.

Yes, definitely.

glad there was a good outcome but yeah, that's some poisonous shit to have to wade through to get there

It was definitely an "easier" decision because no one really knew this guy. I had no idea who he was until my friend told me about the rape. It's harder when the guy is someone more "ingrained" in the scene, like there is one dude who has been around forever, and has put on tons of shows for people, who had assaulted and manipulating and cheated on and just been a total shithead to a previous girlfriend (who is also in the scene), but this dude pretty much gets a pass.

i am so glad you made that call! and sorry you had to listen to a bunch of bullshit. also this:

there is something glamorous about being viewed as a childless Satan-Hitler by intrusive acquaintances.

― sarahell, Monday, 14 April 2014 16:43 (4 days ago) Permalink

is awesome and made me lol a lot.

i love this thread! i just caught up on it and have been feeling a lot of things. i have no irl female friends these days--well, i'm working on making one, but it's early days--and i am historically the flaky friend. i've been cringing at the pain i likely caused a few erstwhile friends along the way. those of you who are being frozen out, i'm sorry, and i recommend you take the same course Abbs is taking, but know that it is entirely possible that your disappeared friend still cares about you, she is just really bad at managing life. not making excuses, just i am absolutely that friend and i can't even really account for myself.

i miss female friends something fierce. i feel like i've kind of earned my female friendless state karmically, but still.

also carl and LL, i have a friend in Chicago who has told at least one story about how st4rlee kline is a jerk. the friend in question is so kind i have always hated kline as a result.

the friend in question is also a female friend i have flaked on repeatedly...