Working On Forgiveness And Growth – Part 2

June 21, 2013

Better personPicking up from yesterday –

Our friendship got even rockier when I was on The Price is Right – a childhood dream come true. And everyone was watching it.

My mailman watched it. Someone who took an EKG for my kidney screening watched it. A person I met on a plane watched it. Every person who took even the slightest interest in me watched it.

But this person did not.

He said he’d make time to watch it. But weeks went by with no viewing. You don’t have 15 minutes to watch my parts of the episode in a matter of weeks? You’re not Tyler Perry (the busiest entertainment person I could think of). Turn on your TV. Am I right, here?

(I usually try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but we talked during this time. I know he wasn’t coming up on a deadline, trapped in an ashram without access to technology, in the hospital, or under any other extenuating circumstances.)

Not solely because of/totally specific to the Price is Right, we decided to just sort of take a break from being friends.

I usually think it’s a somewhat extreme step to cut people completely out of your life. Sometimes you have to, and it’s actually (probably) the healthiest thing. But, with as small as the world is (and especially as small as L.A. is), it doesn’t necessarily always seem like the best idea to me.

Chances are, you will run into that person again. And if you can at least be around each other and make small talk, that’d probably be nice. And usually the people you want to cut completely out of your life are ones who were deeply, deeply in it – ones who you care a lot about. And whatever happened, you just cannot talk to them anymore.

But this is not that. We’re friends, sure. Maybe even good friends – or at least better friends than me and many of my other friends. (Or were we? Guess it depends how you quantify friendships.) But, there’s nothing so intense about this friendship to make me think I could never speak with him again.

I thought that maybe a complete break was taking it a bit too far. However, I’ve been very happy about it overall.

Only by taking a break from him/our friendship did I realize that I’d been spending way too much time feeling like something was wrong with me because of this one random person who kept saying I was oh-so-great, then wouldn’t make time to do anything with me.

I have to admit, I felt free and happy without talking to him.

But, I still feel a little guilty that we kind of had to take a break. I don’t take all the blame, but I don’t put all the blame on him either.

When the decision was made that we’d break for a bit, I thought I should at least write an apology letter, just clearing the air in case a small break became a breaking ties forever.

I figured I wouldn’t write it right away – taking time to let any emotions settle.

The other day, a little over a month after the break went into effect (it sounds so official when I say “went into effect,” but it’s really not all that super official or anything), I saw something that made me think of him and I texted him about it (’cause really, the break wasn’t so uber official to make me think I wasn’t allowed to send one text in over a month).

Shockingly, he texted me back pretty quickly. I did not expect that.

I don’t expect us to become great friends again over night, or maybe even ever. But, I thought it was nice that we could at least say hello.

And this is where I’ll pick up tomorrow.

I'd love to hear from you! So whaddya say?