I was going to write something that had meaning and changed my perspective for sure, but that topic was a bit too sensitive to even write about. Instead I’m going to write about some new people in my life and helped me see things in a different light.

In the begining of highschool I was dragged into a bunch of drama solely because of the people I associated with, because of that I became more distant with people and fairly antisocial. Throughout those years I only stuck by five people and two of them began to seem a bit toxic. One of the two came to attend Rowan with me. I thought she was a really good friend until she began to invest herself into my life. My classes, social life, and even my love life. 

She would tell me to make sure I attended classes when in reality she wasn’t attending hers. I was going through a really rough patch since the beginning of the semester so I couldn’t constantly be energetic or generally happy and she was rude to me about it. Not knowing what I was going through. At one point she told me to not even come around if I was going to be depressed so of course I backed away. 

I spent an entire day with her roommate, who became my best friend, and my boyfriend to work on ways to cope and better my mental health. Away from her with no form of communication. She found out and came up to me and my boyfriend with pure hostility disguised as concern. She then proceeded to lecture my boyfriend who was also having a hard time, but of course she didn’t know of that either. “You can’t just steal her away from her friends. She doesn’t have to always be with you,” she began. “and you need to push her to make sure she attends her classes. Right, I don’t like you because you were with her the night she went home later than she was supposed to. As her boyfriend you need to make sure that doesn’t happen…” … I was having an anxiety attack and he was there to calm me down making sure I was okay.

She went on and on until I got the courage to yell at her. “Can you just shut up? I appreciate you for looking after me and trying to protect me, but I am more than capable of making my own decisions and so is he. I don’t need you to tell me what to do and what choices to make. You don’t know about the things that are pushing me to make the decisions I have made so far andI don’t expect you to understand it. I simply want you to back off and just worry about yourself.”

She barely flinched but she sure as hell got angry at me. I started backing away from her more and more trying to detach myself from her in a way that she’d barely notice. 

Backing away showed me the differences in people. The ones who truly care about my well being and the ones who simply want to control me to a certain degree. It also helped me see that without revealing such a shitty person in my life I would not have been able to separate the people who truly care from the ones that don’t.