companionship.

A response to JD's most recent entry:

Dear JD,

        Though I'm not sure who I really am, I feel like you are the person around whom I come closest to finding myself, if that makes any sense. I can't act myself around my family. I can't act myself around most of my other friends. There is always a large element of fakery. I don't have to dumb myself down around you, and if I feel like acting stupid I am able to, without any hardcore judging.

        Also, it really makes me feel special and useful when you rant to me about your issues. I haven't ever had someone who understood me so much and didn't think I was a total snob. You help me remember that perhaps I am sane, in a world where nobody understands nor cares to. Whenever I try to talk how I normally want to talk, people around me write me off as purposely pretentious. Whenever I complain about my life, I am unappreciative of all that I have and only see the negative in things. Both of those things are probably true, but it doesn't help me any when people just write me off because of them.With the negativity factor, it is highly self-perpetuating. I look for rejection in everyone I meet, and when I am looking for the rejection I give them the reason to reject me.

        I don't like to hang out with people because somehow whenever I do I feel guilty. I don't quite understand why. I know my parents would always penalize me when I was younger if I wanted to hang out with other kids. They would act extremely irritated and make me do double violin practice time, double the problems they would assign for me, and/or extra chores. They don't do that kind of thing anymore, and partially because I just stopped hanging out with people, but I guess now I still associate having a good time with a need to be punished. Now my parents are so used to me not having a social life that if I happen to have something to do they think that something big is happening and I am all of a sudden about to be distracted from my studies. My mother especially believes that the moment I go to someone's house I am going to stop caring about school. Every day now she wastes about an hour of my already scarce time to just talk to me nonstop about how I'm a big slut and I don't care about anything. Yet, I don't even do anything outside of school.

        I don't have best friends because like you, I am afraid of being hurt. In the future I can only see people leaving me, separating and going off to different schools and splitting and leading their own lives without me, as they have so often done in the past. Of course, for now there is no imminent danger of you abandoning me. Yet, as the past has also shown, that safety can evaporate at any point. What is the point of dubbing a person as your best friend if you have no idea what the future will hold? Then you will still have that awkward label attached, and not the real companionship, just as has happened with you and A. Not applying that label makes things easier. No commitments or expectations, no exclusions and no complications. It's also kind of hard to accept that you could be my best friend, because that position for you is already filled with a handful of people. I would count myself as your backup confidante because none of your best friends will listen.

        Still, our friendship is like nothing that I have had before. If I could allow myself to have a best friend at all, you would be it. 

-T.