A few weeks after my 16th birthday, I made a new friend at my new school, Steve. Within months we’d become best friends and basically inseparable. Just platonic friends but we did everything together, went to music festivals, had our first foreign holiday together, took drugs together, shared our favourite books, had discussions long into the night, shared our secrets and problems that we’d never tell anyone else. Went through all kinds of difficulties and hardships and loss side by side. He was my best friend for nearly a decade, and at age 25 we finally lost touch. He moved to another city and my health took a turn for the worse. One day it was just the last time we saw each other and now it’s been 17 years.
Those 17 years haven’t been good for me, with my worsening health, having to give up work and socialising, and just losing all hope of ever having anything worthwhile. But I often thought of Steve and everything we’d shared.
Today i was googling people I’d known and I found a social media page for Steve. He’s now married with two kids. It seems crazy to me that this whole time I’ve been sitting here rotting alone he’s been living his best life. He and his wife and kids all look so happy in their pictures. All the photos are of them happily goofing around together with all their friends and family, going on holidays and living life. And I am happy for him, he was always a great friend and decent person who deserves to be happy but it just highlighted to me how empty and pointless my life is. 17 years have passed and what has changed for me? Just everything getting worse.
It’s also crazy to me that after such a long and close friendship i didn’t even know he was married, much less being invited to the wedding. So strange how you can be such close friends with someone for so long and not even be at their wedding. I was not well enough to go anyway but the not even being invited does hurt.
I don’t really know what I hope to achieve with this rant other than I have literally no-one else to talk to, and it’s hard and embarrassing living such a pathetic life when everyone I’ve ever known turned out to be “normal” while I’m now a weird loner shut in who can’t even eat without begging for handouts, who never goes anywhere other than hospital appointments and hasn’t spoken to anyone face to face other than hospital staff, benefit assessors and shop assistants for 17 years.
EDIT: I’m still creepily stalking Steve’s social media and I can’t believe this. He now works as a work coach for the DWP - one of those people who makes benefits claimants lives a misery by slave-driving them into unsuitable employment and sanctioning them (stopping their benefits) as punishment. I never thought he’d do a job like this, he used to be a real man of the people, now he’s on the opposing side. He always used to want to be an engineer. I wonder what happened.
A start of a good relationship begins with being okay for them to end. Doesn’t mean it won’t b painful and it’s idealistic to aim for a perfect one, but nobody has to actually achieve one.
It’s good to reach out to your friends, but if they don’t reach out to you, then it’s fine to also let go. Just like how it’s okay for you to leave your best friend, no matter how much they’ve reached out to you and you can do that at any moment, if they have a problem with that then they probably aren’t worth it. Nobody in this world is that special and that’s fine. Just people is enough, they don’t need to be special.
To most people in the world you are as important to them as I am important to you. It doesn’t matter how much wealth, beauty or commodities either of us have, truthfully neither of us will ever develop a meaningful relationship between one another. We just come here probably because our lives are kind of boring and we need a stimulus or we’re trying to influence others to do better, something along those lines. But I definitely wouldn’t take friendship advice from here or anywhere really, it’s best to let go of your expectations, focus on yourself and if you want to you can find people to tag along, it will get more difficult as we age, its’ more difficult the more out of “norms” you are too, sadly, it actually used to be easier for disabled people to live our lives, unless they needed medical advancement to survive (which most of us can’t afford to get anyways), but back in the day we could do something as simple as picking berries or cleaning the house and we’d be seen as worthy members of society. There’s valuable lessons in history, not to romanticize it, because advancement can bring great joy to many more people’s lives, it’s about who reaps the benefits of such advances.
Look at how poor, disorganized and desperate we are. Despite all that we still seem to be capable of figuring out a great deal of stuff and yet the richest of humanity seem entirely and completely incapable of running it smoothly. So much access to anything their minds desire and so little achievements. This is the end result of culture built on comparison, envy, demands. Don’t be like them.