A tale of friendship gone sour
Making a lot of friends was never a big deal to me growing up; my close friends never liked my "accommodating" lifestyle. I was too friendly and cool with everyone, they always say. I only greeted them nothing serious, I always replied defensively. Even though I understood their plight, I couldn't help but start reducing my greetings while with them (trust me i tried)
A little back story, growing up, I was always appointed in one leadership role or another; was always involved in so many activities even though i always rejected those roles at first. There was a time I was voted in a position as a captain with no rival or competitor which was one crazy experience for me cause I couldn't even resist and drop it for someone else. Yea it was more like a forceful position if you ask me.
Due to many leadership roles as a youngster, I never wanted to be a bad leader or did things the wrong way so I invested time into studying materials and resources on how to lead and improve my people skills. It was fun engaging people and seeing goals being achieved as planned. NO ONE ever talks about the extra time you put in as a leader planning and making sure everyone gets their job done and as part of building people skills, you have to always go out of your comfort zone to always care for people. Caring for people in this case has now developed into having greeting skills lolz
One of the perks of being a leader is that you automatically become popular amongst your peers, seniors and even the management whether you liked it or not. More eyes were on you than you ever could imagine. Many of the days I was greeted by people I never knew and many greeted like they knew me from way back which could be weird at first cause I was busy racking my brains to remember where we met before only to realize they were complete strangers. So I decided to always greet back with courtesy and never try to go personal into details.
My friends however never liked the whole greeting and sometimes they tend to keep grumpy faces. After a while due to activities associated with my post, I had to wait longer even when everyone left. I was always assigned more work to prepare for the next outing or activity lest I forget I was also a secondary school student just like everyone else. As painful as it was I lost most friends as we couldn't spend as much time as we used to and I was always tagged the busy one even when I made time for them.
There were times I got so busy to go see my friends because I had meetings upon meetings even during weekends and started missing out on activities like friendly football matches between us friends to playing games at game house or doing school assignments together comparing notes to see whose handwriting was worse or whose drawing gave out the most marks. Games we played including hide and seek was becoming a reality in the real world as we kinda started hiding from each other with no one there to seek and I can say we did a perfect job at it as we didn't even realize how excellent we were in the game. I guess after a while, we became used to the fact that time changed and we drifted apart so well we didn't even realize until it was too late. Yea we tried finding a balance but it seemed forced already as little to no commitment was involved on both sides.
Friendships are quite important and takes efforts and serious work. I can not over emphasize the place of efforts and checking up on friends, many abuse this but I must confess now I know better and therefore can do better and have done better so far
Looking back now and knowing what I know now, a proper time management skill could have helped kept some of those friends but I got overwhelmed with the goals and achievement even though I made many marks and was praised, I realized I was alone in all of this
P.s this is my first blogpost on here
A big shout out to 
