Hi lovlies! Welcome to a very late SOS! Sorry I sort of disappeared there for a while! It's a long story but I'll spare you the details and get on with my Soap Opera.
If you're playing along, lovely Brillig the Greatest is hosting this week, so leave your link in her Mr. Linky. If you want to play along, go here for the rules! We'd love to have you join our dramatic fun!
Last Sunday (when I didn't post - BADKATE) I promised you something entirely different than what I'm writing, but something has been on my mind this week so I'm going to write about that. I'll write that other story really soon. Crossmyheart.
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Lately, I've been thinking a lot about a lost friend. Way back in my awkward years, right when I needed a friend very badly, I met someone I really thought was a soul mate of mine. We truly had the most wonderful time together and became instant best friends. I loved her family, I loved being with her . . . I loved everything about her.
We stayed the best of friends through many years, helping each other through high school, college, heartaches, horrible injustices, broken engagements, marriages and many, many other things. She was truly one of the most wonderful friends I've ever known. However, there was a little "issue" going on in the background. She was sort of a compulsive liar. She would lie about very strange things and seemed unable to keep stories straight so that there was always a different story being told to a different person. What was odd is that she never really lied about anything that was that big of a deal. It was mostly stuff that didn't matter anyway, so myself and the other girls who were friends with her usually laughed it off and let it go. She was a wonderful, caring, kind friend who would have stood in front of a train for anyone she loved, so we all just thought it was easier to let it go.
As the years passed it started to get harder and harder to believe anything she said. It was almost as though she had built her life on things that were entirely false and she didn't know what was true and what was made up anymore, and as her best friend, it seemed strange to me that she didn't trust me or love me enough just to be HERSELF with me, rather than this person she had sort of . . . made up.
Then, the lies started getting bigger and were covering up bigger problems. Things that were starting to affect other people. It was hard to not call her out on them, but I'd never been THAT friend . . . I have always been uncomfortable with confrontation and it just seemed easier to let her think she was getting away with it rather than try to confront her and have the lie get even bigger. Things were easier and more fun when there wasn't any trauma or confrontation and, as I mentioned, she was never a bad friend to me . . . she just lied a lot about other things that were going on in a big way.
Then there was a big blow up in her life, and as her best friend, I was asked to help intervene on her behalf to fix things. I knew both parties involved and though I knew I should stay out of it, I thought maybe I could help. What I learned is that both people involved had serious issues. Issues that I couldn't help with. Issues that needed a professional therapist. The lies that my friend had told were starting to affect the other person involved, and the other person had some serious issues that were very much affecting my dear friend in a very negative way. I told both parties they needed professional help.
Telling my friend this was not the best idea. I hurt her beyond my words to describe her pain. I felt awful about it. I re-thought my place in the issue and then I kindly told both parties that I shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place and I needed to stay out of it and they needed to work it out themselves.
However, I was already in a little too deep. The other party in the issue had found something that they felt I needed to know about my friend, and it was sent to me in an email. What I saw in the email was very shocking to me, and I responded to the email stating my shock and asking what was going to be done. Later that night I received a phone call from my friend. She had seen my email and felt that I had completely betrayed her.
I am not proud of my involvement in this issue. I am a meddler/conflict solver by nature and it was hard for me not to want to "help" my friend with her situation, but it was NOT my place to get involved. That phone call was not easy. My friend was justifiably angry and felt I had taken the other person's side. In my (lame) defense, I felt, and still feel, both parties were incredibly wrong in what they had done and I told them both so. They had asked for my help and I had tried to do my best. I am not good at being on one person's side. I was brought up to always try to look for the other person's reasons before judging them too harshly. That is what I was doing in this situation, wrong or right.
My friend and I worked that issue out and tried to move on from that day. We tried very hard to get over it and become close again. She eventually worked out the problem and life seemed to calm down and we attempted to completely reconcile, but obviously, it wasn't easy and our once breezy friendship became a very strained friendship from that point on.
About seven or eight months later, this friend, who happened to work for a close family member of mine, was let go. That day she decided to publish a blog post about the wretched conditions of her workplace and her horrid boss, and how excited she was to finally leave that place of filth and be home with her family. Remember, her boss was a member of my family who I loved very dearly.
When I saw the post, I calmly closed the browser, and in my most passive-aggressive attitude (I've mentioned I'm really good at that stuff, right?!?), I deleted her email address from my address book, her phone number from my phone and her link from my blog. I decided that I needed a serious break from the friendship.
My other friends jumped to my family member's defense, and let her know exactly how wrong they felt what she had done was. Then, most of them, not at my bidding, decided to pause their friendship with her as well. I didn't encourage this and truly didn't care if they continued hanging out with her. This was my choice and mine alone, but it seemed most of them had been agitated with her shenanigans for quite some time.
About a week later I received an email from my friend, apologizing for the blog post, but it was too little, too late. I responded back that I needed a break and that being friends with her had just become too hard and too exhausting. I apologized for getting too involved in her personal life and let her know she had never been a bad friend, just that I didn't trust anything she said anymore and it was getting tiresome to keep up with her lies and pretend to be dumb enough to buy them, and then I told her goodbye.
I received a response from her but I never read it.
This all happened about a year ago. A year ago I said goodbye to someone I thought was a part of my soul. Someone I had loved for years and laughed with almost every day. Someone who's dance concerts I had faithfully attended and who was always in the front row of my performances with flowers for me. Someone who's wedding I was part of and who was part of mine, who's daughter I held on the day she was born and who I always expected would be an aunt to my children. She was like a sister to me and it broke my heart to say goodbye to her. I was so exhausted and so sad that she didn't seem to trust me enough to admit the truth and her mistakes to me and I didn't want to be a part of the lies anymore.
I don't know the ending to my soap opera. I don't know if someday we might get past all of this and be friends again. There are times that I miss her desperately . . . and other times I don't. I'm sure she thinks the same things about me. I hope she's happy and doing OK. I don't wish her any ill, I just wish that things could have turned out a little differently.
***I'm being very vague to protect my friend and others here. I'm sorry if this post became confusing in the vagueness. I'm also turning off comments for this post because of how personal it is to me and how many people I know are aware of the people and details of this story. I'd love your comments, just not in a public forum, so please feel free to email them to me at kateastrophe(at)cox(dot)net (there's a link in my sidebar if that's easier, okTHANKSbye)***
