My mother likes to go off of long rants about everything in her life. I think she is a gifted writer. No matter what she writes, it somehow seems poetic. Here's is one of the latest.
I had this friend. I don't have a lot of friends -- I'm hard to like. Anyway, I became pretty reliant on this friendship as I struggled with life, but I also became really frustrated with my friend, who dwelt on her medical issues all of the time. I talked to her almost every day on the phone. She did a lot of nice things for me -- sent me gifts and stuff, was kind to me. But she had this real defensive thing going where it was really important to her to always be the smartest person in the room. She had an arsenal of stories about one of two things: 1) The time she knew better than someone with more education and 2) medical conditions suffered by her or someone she knew. Now, because I have so few friends, I confided a lot of confidential things to this person -- intimate details of my life, my doubts, my fears, my daily experiences. So, when it blew up, it blew up badly and it blew up over Facebook. I can't even remember exactly what happened, to be honest but it got ugly, fast. She defriended me, made a bunch of posts about me, and it was weird, because all of the things she was saying were things I'd thought about her. I dealt with it in what I thought was a mature fashion. I made no posts about her, did not respond to her posts, wrote her an email apologizing for the falling-out and assuring her I harbored no ill-will towards her. I contacted our mutual friends to say there had been a falling-out, not assigning any blame, and saying I still valued their friendship. Then I just left it alone, blocked the person and got on with my life. I figured this was the best way to deal with it. But apparently, my ex-friend did not feel the same way. I became a regular topic of hate-speech and she slandered me to many people, including my ex-husband and some of our mutual friends, using details I'd disclosed to her during the time we'd been friends. I'm mentioning this because apparently she's still at it. Now, I'm sorry I leaned on her so hard when we were friends. I was pretty alone in the world and really struggling. I was lonely and often pretty frightened and I really appreciated her friendship, but I ignored the warning signs -- her penchant for gossip, her willingness to slander other people. I should never have been so free with my mouth. I know she monitors my FB activity still, even guides the responses of some of our mutual friends. The moral of the story is, don't lean on your friends too hard and know that if they gossip about other people, they're going to gossip about you, too. I have great regrets over this.
