Deciding To Stop Living For Your Friends

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We all have those friends. You know, the perennially fucked up ones. The ones that always try to get you to do blow on a Monday night. PARTY! Except not, you have a ton of work to do with real responsibilities.

The thing is, a lot has changed since you’ve all graduated. You managed to finagle your way into getting one of those “big person” jobs, a steady relationship, and heavy flow of monthly bills to pay (the only one they seem to worry about is their period). You love your friends, you really do. And the few times you see them now, you’re just happy they’re living up to the lifestyle they’ve cleverly crafted for themselves.

But then…there’s this tinge of sadness too. You think how easy it’d be to just update your blog instead of going in to work, like they do. Or even better, you envision how fun it’d be to surf Pinterest for hours bleary-eyed instead of cramming for your grad school capstone. You want to complain about how growing up sucks, but then you swallow it back and don’t let the thought back in. One of those “Out of sight, out of mind” things.

You’ve made new friends at work and they’re nice enough:Older, responsible, boring. You miss you’re old friends on those balmy summer nights…but it hurts too much to think about it because every time you see them, you get worried. There are more cracks on their face now than there are on their iPhone screen.

You want to help because they look lost. But you can’t help them anymore; you can’t keep carrying them. Not on your shoulders from the bar, and you definitely can’t bring yourself to give them petty cash for their cabbie. You just can’t anymore. Salvation is no longer an option. It is not longer your role.

At a certain point you realize, their negativity brings you down. Talking about your neurosis with them when you’re all fucked up together and complaining about how therapy isn’t working gets really old really fast. I mean cool, you all finished college together and you’ve all seen each other’s worst…but you realize slowly realize your friendship was blurred by the idealism and comfort of college and now that you’re in the real world you just can’t afford to fuck around.

Maybe you just don’t mesh well with you’re BFFs as you once thought you did. People change. You’ve changed and they seem to need space. Your friendship is a far cry from the days you were all convinced being an adult meant doing Groupon outings, but I mean, you’ll both find each other when it’s time…until then just keep liking their Facebook posts because that seems to be the only way they can process “affection” right now.