Completely irrelevant to the above conversation, but I don't care! I'm going to do some theraputic posting and hopefully give you guys a little advice with friendship.
Back in highschool I met a friend who eventually went by the nickname "Tora". Tora and I hit it off really well because of a mutual love of Sailor Moon. She was a little odd at times (since the first year and a half I knew her she wore only one outfit among other things), but because of her I was able to out myself as an anime fan.
Things were really great, but because of her parents being constantly busy and wrapped up in their own lives (to which they often kind of shoved their four kids to the side), my parents developed issues because they ended up driving use everywhere and also some problems with Tora's personality.
Nonetheless, Tora was a great support through some really difficult times in my life, but sophmore year something happened. She started a blog. In this blog she would vent her feelings without a care as to the other party. A few times I ended up the target of her frustrated postings, and this really really hurt. The main start of this was that I had started dating her best friend from gradeschool. We'll call him "Shini" since... that's what we called him. It was short for "Shinigami", you know, back before "Shinigami" was a house hold word. (Yeah, I be cool all right). Anywho, turns out Tora's little sister had a massive crush on Shini and was also depressed and suicidal! To top it off, she sent me hate mail.
So what did I do? I went to my parents who talked to Tora's parents, therefore causing Li'l Sis to go to a therapist. Well, this didn't go over so well with Tora and she put the blame on me (of course). Eventually the real huge drama blows over blahblahblah, BUT I never, ever could get over the fact that I was put to blame for everything and I internally declared our friendship dead.
Things were not so cut and dry as "Well, now that we're not friends, I'll give her the finger and tell her to bugger off". I was a coward about it. Because Tora and I shared the same circle of friends, for the remaining time I was in highschool, I pretty much put up a face and tolerated her. My senior year I didn't invite her to my birthday, and when I started deviantART, I posted a gif I made in highschool featuring me, my friend Liz, and Tora whom I labeled as "A person I know". She found out and was terribly hurt about it.
So now I haven't heard from her at all for roughly four years. Today I decided that I was going to purge some of my old art into the recycling and came across all the drawings that she had given me along with some notes stating how she was happy we were friends and that she hoped that things like her getting a boyfriend (who previously liked me. I rejected him.) wouldn't get in the way of our friendship.
I realized moreso than anything else that I didn't handle things well. Sure, the friendship was pretty much doomed to fail at some point in time or another just because of the way I've personally changed, but still this old friendship haunts me with guilt on rare occasion.
So if you've read this far (Kudos!), learn from me: if you have a problem with a friend, for god's sake tell them. Hiding things over does not help because chances are if you're being passive aggressive, they either won't notice or will not figure out why you're acting so cranky around them. If you decide to end a friendship because it's just not getting along, it's best to tell them that, too. I'm still struggling with this big time right now. It takes major cahones to say something like that, but it's much better than what I did by dragging things out in some awful, two-faced farce through high school.
And also, if you do have an issue you need worked out, do it face to face or at least on a phone. IM or email or anything internet related (maybe Skype excluded) just doesn't cut it. You can't tell emotion from words. I've learned this from arguing with my boyfriend. Internet just exacerbates issues. We can go back and forth for hours on IM, but if we argue it out over the phone, it's usually dealt with in and over in a fraction of that time. He doesn't understand passive aggressive behavior, so I also had to learn how to tell him the things that were bothering me.
It's also important to know yourself and your state of being when you're upset. I have three stages of anger. When I'm initially mad at my boyfriend about something, I can't talk to him at first because I have a nasty tongue and will snap at him when I'm like that. The second stage is when I usually consider where I went wrong in the issue and barter things out internally. It's only at the third stage when I've considered things and calmed down that I can really talk to him and work things out.
Given this is about my boyfriend and me, but this is what I would do if I had major issues with my friends now. I wish I had been able to do this in highschool, certainly it would have saved me a lot of grief, crying, and embarrassment, but that's just not how things panned out.
Reading through this and remembering, Tora was bitchy and self righteous from time to time and wouldn't apologize when she had hurt my feelings by bashing me through her blog, but I had expected her to act the way I would have in her position, and that wasn't right. Because I just pouted and acted childishly, internally demanding that she come forth and apologize first before I forgave her, things just got worse and abruptly ended without any sort of definite cut off. It could have been handled so much better.
So there you go. My lengthy history that, honestly, I really don't like to talk about much. I hope it wasn't too annoying, and I hope maybe you guys learn something from it. It's embarrassing because while I definitely think she had a part in our friendship's ending, I had just as equal of a part. I hope you guys can avoid the problems that I've had.
ADDED NOTE: I guess there was some drama or something on the forums again, and I just want to STREEEEESSSSS that this post has nothing to do with that. Seriously. Like I said, I was cleaning out my closet and that was the spark for this. Longest. Post. EVAR.
