Unrealistic Expectations

I am slowly but surely beginning to realize that, at times, I have rather unrealistic expectations for the people I call my friends.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been well known to drop everything for a friend in need.  I make personal sacrifices and I bend over backwards.

But because that’s something I’m willing to do doesn’t mean that I have a right to expect the same degree from other people in my life.  Not that I expect people to bend over backwards for me, just that sometimes I find myself feeling let down by people, when I’d really set the bar quite high to begin with.

“You want the Jesus of all friends, Felicia,” Willie once told me.  And sometimes I do.  There’s nothing wrong with wanting that sort of a friend, I think.  But expecting friends to rise to that level is unrealistic and unfair.

I often talk myself out of friends.  I tell myself that they wouldn’t do what I’d do for them, so why bother?  Why work for a friendship that will inevitably let me down?  I’m working on this.  Most days.  I think it all stems from my general insecurities and a string of events that occurred in high school where my personal and emotional health was put at risk because of a “friend” I was trying to help.

Friendships, like relationships, have a sort of cycle or timeline to them.  At first, the friendship is shiny and new, and you’re excited to have a new person in your life.  You delight in learning new things, and retelling stories that all your other friends think have gotten old.  You begin spending more time with this person than your other friends, because they’re new and wonderful, and you adore them.  

But then, slowly, the cracks begin to show.  They’re a flake, or a pathological liar, or a gossip, or they chew with their mouth open.  You begin to regret the personal things you may have trusted them with.  Irritation begins flitting in and out of your time spent with them as pet peeves are violated and their flaws start to get to you. 

Here’s where I begin to pull away, every time (Honestly, this is true of relationships and friendships as well).  At this point, I begin delaying text returns, dodging calls, making excuses to avoid hanging out.  I start to mourn the friendship lost, while simultaneously telling myself they weren’t a good enough friend anyway.  I mean, look at what I did for them that they never repaid me for or even said thank you about!  Look!  See, this is justifiable!

But, mostly, I just need to realize that everyone has flaws.  Not every friend I acquire will be a best friend.  Not every friend will have flaws I can overlook all the time and love them for regardless.  Those friends are rare, and I need to appreciate that a bit more.  Instead of walking away from the cracks as they form, I need to simply skip over them and continue on.

Here’s to friendship, ladies and gents.

“Have you ever felt love? Really, really felt love, the kind that could save a life?”

Dia Frampton, “Don’t Kick the Chair”

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If you read this post, you have to acknowledge that, while there are different kinds of love, there is, to some degree, a base for it all that comes from the same place.

You also have to realize that this is complicated, especially for me.

I have a lot of love inside of me for the people that touch my life.  Whether I’ve known you for a day, a month, a year, or my whole life.  I have always prioritized this love.  Love, and my love for others, is more important than homework, work, personal struggles, pain, anything and everything.  Yes, this has hurt me at times, because sometimes the love I feel for a friend, a lover, a family member, is stronger than the love they feel for me.  But, that’s what’s really quite grand about love.  Whether if hurts, bites, takes away at times, it always reimburses you for the damages.  When I lose love for someone or from someone, I find that someone or something (because animals love too) will fill that hole.  Always.

I will always stop my life for love.  Perhaps that’s a flaw, perhaps it’s a positive attribute.  It’s been both at some point in my life.  I’ve gotten into fights to defend my friends, I’ve stayed up all night on the phone for a loved one.  I’ve failed tests, skipped school, sneaked out after my parents were asleep, all to care for people I love.  And I regret none of that, whether it hurt or not.

While I have a very hard time accepting the love of others at times, I have little to no difficulty in heaping my love onto anyone I feel needs it.  

The thing I struggle with most, is wanting to give love to someone who doesn’t want it.  I don’t mean “love” here in a relationship sense, I mean platonic love in the base sense.  I want to be there for you, and I want to show you that you are worth love from all sorts of places.  But you won’t let me, and I don’t understand that.  Even though I can be the same way.

Shut up.  Let your guard down for a second.  And let me be there for you.  Let me show you the kind of love that can save a life.  Because the only reason I’m here today, the only reason I’m alive to write this post, is because someone loved me when I needed it most.

Oh, Mansfield.

There’s something about this city.

It’s altogether not a good something.  Maybe it’s the fact that I grew up here, so there is literally not another place on the planet with as many memories floating around.  Maybe it’s because so many people from my past are still here, sinking into this city, becoming part of its foundation.  Maybe it’s because being here means staying with my parents most of the time.

I sat down with an old friend last night.  

He told me all the things about me that he thought made me worth being friends with.  I didn’t expect this from anyone in Mansfield, let alone an ex-boyfriend.  He told me that it mattered to him if I smiled, or laughed, or not.  I never thought anyone thought about me that much, as to care whether I laugh.  He hugged me a lot, told me I was pretty, gave me a beer and a cigarette.  There were no motives, no awkward physical advances, no second-meanings, no cryptic phrasing for me to puzzle out later.

My old crowd, the kids I ran with when I was trouble, was not a good crowd for me long-term.  But.  I have never, ever, ever, had a group of friends since them that were as fiercely loyal, honest, steadfast, and solid as they were.  I have never been able to lean on anyone the same way I could lean on them.

I never expected to get that back.  I never thought that, after separating myself from them, leaving Mansfield, getting out, I would ever be able to expect the same amount of fierce loyalty and love from the small pocket of my old friends that I can still be around.  I can really only see two of them, because I burned bridges when I left, and because some of them would just be dangerous for me to be around.

It’s nice to have someone you didn’t expect to care be there for you.  It’s a simple surprise, but it’s one I don’t take lightly.

Sometimes, all you need is fierce loyalty, real honesty, and a solid hug.

Sometimes, all you want is to be handed a beer and a cigarette, and be told that you’re pretty.

So I’ve got this friend…

Aha, you say.  “Friend”.  Code word, the writer of this post herself.

Nope.  I’ve really got this friend.  If I can even call him by that word anymore.  He was by best friend.  And I mean BEST FRIEND.  When my girl-friends let me down, he was there.  When my life got tough, I went to him.  When I had a bad day, he took me to dinner at my favorite restaurant, or out for ice cream, or just for a long drive with a really good mix CD.  Bottom line, he got me. 

So now, he’s dissolved into this other life.  He wears two faces.  When he’s away at college, he’s the party-hardy frat boy lady-killer.  He’s crude and he sleeps around, and he appears to have given up on everything that defined him as my best friend in the first place.

When he’s “home” from college, he’s similar to who he was.  Not the same, but close enough that I still feel like I want to fix this brokenness between us. 

He always calls me “sis”, but I can’t feel like I can call him my brother anymore.  Not with this uncertainty going on.  I mean, who’s the real guy?  Is the fratstar figure that he’s become the real one?  Or is the mild-mannered chivalrous, thoughtful, funny, caring guy he is when he’s home the real one?  I just wish I knew, because then I’d know how to regard him.  I’d know how to be a friend to him, if I knew who he really is.

Anymore, I try not to think about him, because thinking about what he was, the friendship we had, and where we’ve gone from there simply breaks my heart.

Losing a best friend is the worst thing that can happen to someone.  I wish I knew what to do.

Life. And other related garbage.

Do you ever look at your life and realize that no one really knows you?  I mean, you have friends.  You love people, are there for them, party with them, and consider them close.  But do they really know you?

I hit that realization tonight talking to my friend.  Besides her, Willie is the only person that is still in my life that actually knows all of me.  And by that I mean my story, my life, my past, and why I am who I am today.

Maybe it’s because I don’t share it often.  It’s not relevant anymore, my past.  My past defined me, it made me who I am today.  But it’s not who I am anymore.  I don’t need to apologize and explain that I’m broken for blanketyblank reasons anymore.  I don’t need to preface stories with explanations, and I don’t need to examine myself based on that anymore.

I guess that’s why I’ve been putting my foot in my mouth extra frequently.  At a euchre party we hosted, I oh-so-casually mentioned my mother’s tendency to physically abuse me when I was young, because it was relevant to conversation in the moment.  It wasn’t until the awkward silence that Willie then had to break that I realized I’d disclosed something particularly personal.  All I thought was, my friend was making a case for why fingerprint bruises wasn’t abuse (out of naivety, not stupidity, mind you), and I told him he was wrong, for said reasons.  

Then it got me thinking.  Even one of my closest friends didn’t know my biggest secret until I casually threw it into a conversation as he was helping us move in.  It rendered him speechless, but I rolled on with my story for awhile before I realized that he hadn’t already known.  

We share so little in our lives sometimes that even when our secrets don’t feel like secrets anymore, we still don’t let people see them.  I’m not ashamed or embarrassed of my story.  Not one bit.  But two people know that side of me.  Two people know my story.  And only I know my entire story, from start to finish.  Are stories meant to be secret?  When they don’t impact us the same way, when we’ve dealt with them and moved on, do they still need to be hidden?  Why?  Because they were a secret to begin with, or because they’re just not relevant anymore?  Why don’t we tell our stories?  I bet we’d all feel a lot better if we did.

The grass is always greener….

I couldn’t tell you if it was the weather, the fact that we have to go grocery shopping with our host dad today, or the fact that the group of people we were hoping to call friends have split up into multi-groups.  But I’m feeling rather melancholic today.

After last weekend’s chaotic, stressful, and exhausting trip to Belgium, Willie and I have decided to take this weekend slow.  

I’m finding that there are three types of Miami students here at MUDEC.  

There’s the rich, careless, thoughtless, arrogant trust-fund babies who blow about 1,000 euros a week in alcohol (mostly at this pub called Das Boot), and travel every single weekend because they want to party in as many countries as possible.  These kids don’t even remember half of their trips, because they get so drunk.

Then there’s the awkward crowd of kids who are literally here to take classes, broaden their horizons, and luncheon with a new professor every day.  They never travel, because they want to explore Luxembourg to death, and partly because they’re all singular persons, without a group to travel with.  These kids are tolerable, because they’re chill.  They’re intolerable because they lack social skills and feel the need to be “better than you party kids”, and extreme smarty pants.

And then there’s the group I consider Willie and I to be a part of.  The group that would love to travel everywhere and see everything, but overall is just happy to even be here in the first place.  We are the kids that can’t afford to travel too much, and find travelling every weekend just exhausting anyways.  We are looked down on by the drunk kids, because we don’t have any interest in spending each weekend wasted.  We’ve little desire to hang out with the know-it-alls and talk academia every minute of the day.  So far, there are four or five of us that fit into this group.  I wish there were more, because the five of us don’t even hang out together all the time.  We’re lonely.

So, here I am, sitting in a beautiful apartment with a wonderful view.  Living with my new friend, soaking up Europe.  But I’m still a little sad.  Maybe it’s homesickness, maybe it’s the desire to make more new friends.

 Maybe it’s the idea that life in the USA, at Miami, in Mansfield, is moving along so quickly without me.  The concept that life doesn’t stop moving just because you’re an ocean away.  Europe can be an awfully lonely place if you let it.