On Loneliness: Friendships, Part 1

The more I thought about the topic of friendship, the more I realized that I have a lot to say about it. Therefore, I’ve decided to break this section of the series into three parts. This first part will deal with my childhood & junior high friendships; the second with my high school & college friendships; and the third part will cover adult friendships & conclusions.

I’m one of those people who, on the surface, appears to be really good at friendships. At least, I’m friendly with a lot of people. I have been since college. How can you be lonely? I feel like people are thinking. You know so many people. While that’s true, my friendships have rarely been as close as I would like. Because my family has never been particularly tight, friendships have always been very important to me. However, I’ve always secretly felt that I’m not as important to my friends as they are to me.

Honestly, I’m pretty sure the problem is me. I’m shy about friendships. I like to play my hand pretty close to my chest, not letting people know how much I like them. I’m afraid of appearing overly eager or desperate or, god forbid, needy. I fear rejection.

I’m positive that the seeds of this fear were sown in my childhood, where I faced rejection early and often.

My childhood best friend was the girl who lived across the street. We’ll call her K. We were the same age, but went to different elementary schools. Our friendship mostly stayed in the neighborhood. As I recall it, we were pretty tight.

Things changed the summer before we started junior high together. A girl who lived down the street from us, who was a couple of years younger, broke us up. It was something I didn’t understand then. I still don’t really understand it today, nearly 30 years later. I’m not sure what her end game was. Maybe she was just being evil in the way that girls that age can be evil. The details are fuzzy for me now, but I clearly remember her telling us lies about things each of us supposedly said about the other.

I’m not sure why it worked. As I remember it, I didn’t believe her lies, but K did (granted, my memory could be faulty, allowing me to remember things the way I want rather than how they were). It was very bewildering and painful. In the end, I went into junior high without a best friend. K and I never really made up. Years later, when we were in high school, we discussed the break up briefly and had a laugh about it. But we were never friends again.

In junior high, I had two close girlfriends, N and C. If my memory serves correct, N and I were closer in sixth grade, and I became close to C later, after she moved from another state into my neighborhood. C and I were close enough that we chose to be locker partners in eighth grade, a huge deal because we were required to carry our eighth grade locker partners over into ninth grade, which was at the high school.

Junior high was a tough time for me. I’d been teased to some extent in elementary school, but it was really bad in junior high. Kids were mean. I was easy pickings. N was the first in my long string of friendships with girls that I would now call “troubled.” She came from an even rougher background than me. She lived in a trailer park – a huge social stigma where I grew up. She was even more awkward looks-wise than me. The kids were even meaner to her than they were to me. That’s probably what brought us together. We were united in misery.

C, on the other hand, was pretty normal. I think I started out as a friend of convenience for her. Since she was new to the area, and we lived only a few doors down from one another, I was one of the first people she met. Even so, we quickly became close. I liked her a lot.

I don’t know for sure what happened between me and C. I don’t remember if we had an actual falling out over something. I don’t think so, because as I recall it, partway through eighth grade, C just started to be mean to me out of nowhere. It actually got pretty bad. When I fell in gym one day and sprained my arm and had to go to the hospital, I came back to school the next day to find that C had torn down all of my pictures in our shared locker. This was nothing like it had been with K, where we broke up and then essentially ignored one another. C had a lot of vitriol toward me. Once again, I was thoroughly bewildered.

In hindsight, I believe that C had finally figured out that being friends with me was social suicide, so she dumped me. In high school, she moved on to a more popular clique (not that it was hard to find a group more popular than me). After muddling through ninth grade as uneasy locker partners, we never spoke again.

At the same time, my friendship with N cooled. I don’t remember why. We were never not friends; we just weren’t as close anymore. I know my mother didn’t approve of her, but that probably had little to do with it. Now, I wonder if I did to her what C had done to me, dumping her because she was even lower on the social totem pole than me. I hope this is not the case, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Most preteens are assholes, even me. Whatever the problem, she didn’t deserve my ingratitude. She was really nice. A good friend. 

N got pregnant in high school and dropped out. I’ve never spoken to her again, although she kindly left condolences on my mother’s online obituary (actually, so did K).

It’s probably important here to reiterate that all of this was happening amidst a home environment where I was rarely encouraged to pursue friendships. In fact, my mom often made it difficult to have friends, not allowing parties or sleepovers, complaining if I was on the phone too long, refusing to drive me places, etc. I don’t know if this was a concerted effort on her part to deny me friends or just a lot of different quirks of her personality coming together in a very negative way.

The upshot is, I had a lot of odds stacked against me, and although I struggled hard against them, by time I was fourteen, I’d already been rejected by two of my closest friends. It hurt and it affected the way that I saw friendship from there on out.

Join me next time to discover if I fared any better at friendships in high school.