i hate my best friend

when your best friend’s joy feels like your grief

Dear Anna,

I hate my best friend. Or maybe I just hate how her life feels like everything mine isn’t right now. I’ve had three miscarriages in the past two years. She was the person I leaned on, the one who held my hand when I couldn’t stop crying. But now she’s pregnant, and it’s like my pain doesn’t matter. She’s throwing a huge baby shower in a few weeks and when I told her I wasn’t sure I could handle going, she called me selfish and a bad friend when she’s always been there for me when I needed her.

The truth is, I love her and I am happy for her, but every picture she posts, every registry update, every text about her nausea or her cravings feels like reopening the wound. I don’t want to resent her, but I do. And now I feel guilty for resenting her, and ashamed for not being able to “just be happy.” Is it me? Am I a bad friend? Should I just suck it up and go to her baby shower even though a part of me wants to blow the whole thing up?

Signed,
Bad Friend

Dear Bad Friend,

I used to believe that friendship, girlhood, or whatever else we’ve been taught to believe is essential to our survival as women meant a certain level of martyrdom—that to have friends and to be a friend means going to every bachelorette party and pretending like it’s fun to force feed yourself cheap tequila shots in the name of “showing up”, or shelling out half of your monthly paycheck to buy a bridesmaid dress you’ll never wear again, or pretending like it’s fun to watch the unwrapping of fifty beige onesies at a baby shower as if each box holds the second coming of Christ.

Then, I got depressed—the clinical, soul-crushing kind of depression that makes you feel like maybe you never actually liked anyone, especially yourself, and that maybe you really do enjoy spending your lunch break in your bed at 2pm on a Wednesday with the curtains drawn because active rest is a thing, right? I’ve always said that it’s hard to describe depression, anxiety, and illness of the mental variety to those who have never suffered through it. It’s like trying to explain to someone what color looks like if they’ve only ever seen black and white. People may think they understand because “everyone has bad days”, but talk to someone struggling with depression and they’ll tell you that depression isn’t a bad day, it’s the absence of days. It’s the conviction that your life doesn’t just feel meaningless, it is meaningless.

Suddenly, it wasn’t just a nuisance to have to go to bachelorette parties in far-flung places, or spend money on dresses I didn’t like, or pretend like I found baby clothes cute when pregnancy still scared the shit out of me—it became impossible. I sent my regrets to everything, I stopped responding to texts from well-intentioned friends checking in, and I stopped showing up, not just to social gatherings, but to my life.

When the fog finally lifted after a combination of medication, therapy, and Father Fucking Time, I realized that while some of my friends understood my silence as rest, others perceived it as rejection. Some of my friends gave me grace, while others gave me guilt trips, and that’s when I realized that friendship isn’t martyrdom, it’s discernment. It’s knowing who can hold your hand from a distance when you can’t show up, and who only loves you when you’re clapping in the audience.

I don’t know if you’re depressed. You might actually just be having a bad stretch of days resulting from two years of trying to conceive unsuccessfully and carrying all the emotional baggage that entails. But either way, your Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does not currently involve going to a baby shower and pretending like it doesn’t hurt like all hell, and your priority is not to try to figure out how to be a good friend to someone else when you can’t even be a good friend to yourself. Airplane safety protocol always instructs us to place the oxygen mask on ourselves before helping others with their masks during a sudden drop in cabin pressure, and asking you to take care of your best friend’s feelings right now is like asking you to put on her mask so she can breathe while you’re suffocating in your rapidly depressurizing and baby-less cabin.

I may have lost a few friends, best friends even, during that period of time where I was too depressed to do anything other than show up begrudgingly for work obligations (because, capitalism, ya know), but what I gained was the clarity to learn that some friendships, even the ones that I had held for half of my life, were more rooted in performance than in reciprocity—relationships where I was seen less as a friend and more as a resource to pad the fragile egos of people who never learned what I came to learn: real friendship isn’t measured by how many parties you drag someone to against their will, it’s measured by whether they’ll still love you if they have to go alone.

with love and aggression,
anna

On my subscriber chat this week, I polled you on what you wanted me to write about next, and instead of picking just one topic, I decided to pick all of them:

• “Would love for you to write about mindfulness relaxation techniques”

• “I’ve been struggling letting go, but what you said in your last post about ‘sometimes the person who reminded you of what your dreams are can’t be the one you build them with’, really resonated with me. But in my case, it was so close and I really could see building my dreams with him. Can you talk more about that?”

• “Would love for you to write about how to get over a healthy "breakup". I knew I deserved better and he wasn't a bad person...”

• “How to stay sane (and derive pleasure in your own life) when the world is on fire.”

• “How to deal with feeling like u suck at ‘careers’ especially when everyone u know is raking in big salaries at corporate jobs, and you’re just feeling lost (still) in your 30s”
  

Dear Everyone,

The mantra I’ll repeat from the chat this week is “these are the days that must happen to you.” Walt Whitman said that, not me, but I’ve adopted it as my entire personality because this year has been the wildest of rollercoasters where half the time, I’ve felt both terrified and confused because, well, I voluntarily chose to ride the rollercoaster so why am I complaining about the drop?

And, while I don’t have all the answers as to why I keep choosing to take the rollercoaster instead of the Amtrak in life, I do have some answers to your questions below: