On being a support person:

July 1, 2021Leave a comment

Being someone’s support person is a hard job, but as a human being who needs support, we also need to be able to give it back.

Mental illness and life’s hard moments both are known for knocking us down, and when we get knocked down we need someone more than ever. But honestly, just being alive requires having support, having someone to cheerlead you on. We need that positive push to get us through, we need someone to cheer us on when we win, and comfort us when we lose.

When you have a mental illness, or have gone through a really rough patch, it’s easy to take more support than you give, that’s okay, sometimes we need that, but I really want to talk about giving support back and creating those kinds of relationships.

Going out of your way to support someone is hardly ever going to backfire, especially because to start out, those relationships don’t take a lot out of you. They start small with words of encouragement and some extra time spent caring, then it turns into some of those bigger support tasks (whether it be waiting in the ER with someone or watching their children when they need help). Support is about being there. It’s about being a kind voice of reason and being excited for people. It’s taking an everyday good relationship and pouring a little more effort into it than you feel like is a hundred percent necessary.

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Expanding horizons: On Friendships built on Differences

February 24, 20201 Comment

Have you ever met someone that you have nothing in common with and it bloom into a friendship? It’s an interesting situation, and I mean that in the best way, these people can help you grow and widen your horizons, but they can also just be interesting people to discuss things with.

I think we’ve lost a lot of the art of being friends with different people. We like to surround ourselves with replications of ourselves. We like to know what kind of advice we’re going to get. We like to do our hobbies with other people who like our hobbies. Even if we don’t mean them to be, our friends tend to be very similar to each other. But they don’t need to be, we can have friends from all walks of life with all sorts of different hobbies and ideals. We might not get the joy of hearing our opinions spoken back to us, but we can learn about different ideas and we can fall in love with different activities, or types of music, or books.

We grow when we’re introduced to new and exciting things, but we also are mammals completely dependent on having support systems and being loved. We can find that love in company with all sorts of people.

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The timeline of getting over someone:

December 2, 20191 Comment

I think we’ve been trying to figure out how long it takes to get over a relationship or friendship since they started falling apart, which is to say, since the beginning of time. If you Google how long it takes to get over someone you’ll find answers like “half the time of the relationship” or “18 months” and all kind of other answers. None of us want to submit to the fact that it’s different for everyone, no one wants to talk about the relationships it took years to get over or the friendship loss from six years ago that you’re still bitter about.

It’s tough, but there isn’t any timeline.

It’s tough, but there is good news in that, and it’s that whatever you’re going through is normal. You’re normal. That always brings a big sigh of relief.

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Cutting the cord with negative friends:

July 29, 20193 Comments

I used to have a friend that leaned towards the negative side. She always had a lot to say about people, things, events. It was all bad. Nothing was above gossiping. I put up with it for a while because I still enjoyed the company. I enjoyed when we went out to do things. At my worst I’d play into the gossip a little, at my best I’d change the topic to something else.

The friendship didn’t go up in flames, or maybe it did on her side, maybe I’m the object of that negative gossip now. I wouldn’t have a way to know. What I do know is that despite red flags that this wasn’t the healthiest friendship I continued it till one night. That night we went to dinner, a normal occurrence. I remember walking out of the restaurant and saying goodbye. I felt awful. I was in a bad mood. I felt drained. I had gone in in a good mood and left a mess. After all the red flags, somehow that shift of mood told me that this was the last time I was going to dinner with her. So I went home and I put a lot of space between us until communications halted.

There are times in relationships were we need to bare our friends burdens. When our friends are going through hell they sometimes need to unload. We do it to them and they should be able to do it to us. Depressed friends need support, you can’t just drop people when they get negative about the things in their life. It’s when that negativity continues and spreads to all aspects of life once the circumstance improves. It’s when life gets better for them and they still want to trash on everything and everybody. It’s when the the conversations of others go from “they wronged me” to straight gossip.

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A combination of others: Absorbing traits of those we engage with.

July 24, 20191 Comment

You know when you’ve been hanging around a friend for a long time and you start to pick up their slang words or their facial expressions? It happens subtlety, you normally don’t start to notice it until it’s pretty ingrained. Then suddenly it’s part of you, not just part of your friend.

These things happen to all of us and they happen on the regular. We absorb traits from those we are around the most. Sometimes it’s simple, like a phrase, sometimes it’s more complex. An example of that would be my growth in ambition. My fiance Chris is ambitious, and I’ve always teetered on the line. I’m ambitious about a few things, but for the most part good enough is good enough, but as we’ve been together my ambition has been growing. I want to do a better job at things that normally wouldn’t matter to me. I want to spend more time planning my actions instead of going with the flow. It’s a lot bigger personality change than gaining a phrase, but it’s a positive one.

Not all the things we gain are though. We gain peoples negative traits just as easily as we gain their positive ones. If we hang around a friend who is a gossip, chances are we’ll become a gossip before too long. It’s in our nature. We partake in something, we hang around something, and before long it’s a part of us too.

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Talking drama: How to get as close as you can to drama free

April 18, 2019Leave a comment

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Is anyone ever completely removed from drama? I don’t think it’s possible to avoid it all together, after all, conflict is part of human nature. But there is a difference in the lives of those who nurture drama and those who avoid it. We’ve all met people who thrive in the middle of drama and we’ve all met people who tremble when they see it, there is a way to avoid drama while not being afraid of confrontation and there is a way to know dramatic people without being involved in their drama.

It’s a balancing act, but it’s possible to live a relatively drama free life, I’m going to highlight some of the easiest ways to live a life were you’re not the lead cast in the center of a drama.

Avidly avoid social media conflicts and comment section debates: It’s okay to occasionally make a comment on topic that mean the most to you. Whether it be one of politics or health. What’s counter productive is to say it in a demeaning way and then argue in the comments. Actually avoiding arguments in comments can save you a lot of time. Most conflicts on social media aren’t worthy of your time, because most people on social media aren’t willing to change their mind. It’s okay to keep scrolling and it’s okay to save the debates for a more willing setting.

If their talking about others like that, they’re probably talking about you like that: If you have a friend that is always ranting about someone, there is a big chance that they’re also ranting about you to someone else. It’s near impossible to find someone that doesn’t occasionally let off some bad words about someone, but when you’re hanging out with people who constantly go off about others it’s probably time to reevaluate that friendship. We don’t want our lives to be in their beloved drama reel, so it’s time to stop feeding them with our stories and gracefully step back from the situation. If you need the entertainment watch a reality show on TV, don’t become part of one.

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Friendship: Beautiful but often temporary.

April 8, 2019April 8, 20192 Comments

We like to think that everyone in our life is there forever, and it’s true with family, but with friends it’s normally not the case. We love the concepts of best friends for life and we don’t like to think about the fact that most people only end up passing through. It sounds terrible to say that people are temporary, but yet, their time in our lives often are.

As I was making the guest list for my wedding I found myself thinking back to high school. I thought I’d have a different group on that list then I did, if you flash forward to college, my list would still be a little different. I’ve lost a lot of people over the years, and most of them fell off naturally. It’s not something I think about often, after all, I’ve gained a lot of people too, but some of the people I lost I thought would be around forever. I never thought it was naive to think that, but clearly it was. It got me thinking on how I view friendship and how I should.

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