Listen To Your Friends When They Call You Out
My freshman year I admit I wasn’t the best, best friend ever.
I was with my boyfriend and he was my first serious boyfriend ever, so I was very attached to him, and when I came to live on campus, I felt extremely clingy even though I only lived an hour away from school and came home pretty regularly.
Being at school I felt pretty lonely, and since while I was at school and was feeling distant from my boyfriend, whenever I would go home I would pretty much run straight to his house and wasn’t really making time for anyway else.
My best friend still lived at home, and I would come home every weekend, and only really saw her in passing. When she finally called me out on it I said I just didn’t know when she had to work, which was true, but all I had to do was ask.
I tried to excuse it by saying I felt lonely at school and it was a weird adjustment, but I didn’t take into consideration that she was feeling the same. She’s about nine months younger than me so she graduated from high school a year after me, most of her friends graduated high school and left, including her best friend (me) and boyfriend at the time, so while I was saying how lonely I was, so was she. I mean she didn’t have to go anywhere, but the feeling that everyone is leaving you isn’t really any better than me feeling like I had to leave while everyone else was moving on without me.
It put a very big wedge between us, and we’ve been best friends since we were like two or three years old, and all it took was a few months at college and me spending too much time with my boyfriend to make her feel like I didn’t care about her.
I could’ve argued with her about it, but instead I said let’s hang out and talk about it. I’ll tell you my side you tell me yours.
Don’t always be so defensive and quick to argue. If someone is telling you’re doing something that upsets them, you don’t get to tell them you’re wrong.
And it doesn’t always have to be about what you did to them. If they’re telling you that the way you spoke to someone else or the way you handled a situation was messed up, it’s because they’re a real friend and they’re not just going to do nothing while you walk around becoming a bad person.
Take into consideration how other people are feeling, if you feel called out and they’re really your friend, it’s probably because you needed the reality check anyway.