(Bloggers Note: Let me begin before I dig into today's post about friendship by saying, in case the point was missed which it seems it may have been; it's not about the hook rug. That was a metaphor based on a long since past trend I used as an illustration for a craft kit that drew people in, but for the most part didn't keep them hanging around unless they were innately creative. I was talking as an industry professional and about major craft retailers and mainstream manufacturers. After yesterday, I'm starting to think the hook rug needs to make a come back, but I think that's because most of my readers are highly creative types who could make something interesting out of two sticks and a rock (which is the name of my corporation btw!) I realized something yesterday and it was a powerful realization. People hear exactly what they want to hear...and apparently yesterday people heard me hatin' the hook rug. Don't be a hook rug hater, Madge!

The Impatient Crafter Happy Cute Make Kewpie Contest ends this Monday and I'm wondering where all the Kewpies have gone? Jpegs of your kewpies under 1mb need to be emailed to margot@margotpotter.com! If you're all having time problems please let me know so I can extend the deadline!)

And now back to today's scheduled blog post:

Friends Lost and Found

This past year I've lost some friends. It's not that I've lost track of where they are; I've simply lost their friendship. Some of them have excused themselves from my reality without explanation. Some of them have drifted into the ocean of life. Some of them have made it clear that I'm no longer on the guest list at the party that is their life.

As some of you know, I've moved 27 times in my life. That means I've lost a lot of folks along the way. It makes one reticent at times to make new friends. That being said, it's also meant I've made a lot of friends I may have never met had I stayed in one place my entire life.

No matter how you slice it, losing people stinks. It's one thing to lose them because you both get busy with life, but I think what hurts the most is opening your heart up, offering your friendship, cultivating a relationship, weathering the complexities of human interaction and being categorically rejected for content. I think what cuts the deepest is feeling that you have been entirely misconstrued and there is nothing you can do to change that. Breaking up with friends hurts every bit as much as breaking up with a lover. It's an emotional intimacy that is severed, often without explanation.

One can obsess about these things. Try to deconstruct the moment or series of moments that led to the demise of a friendship, but it's mostly fruitless effort at best. We all see reality differently. I love reading political exchanges because any gathering of people will manage to see the same exact situation entirely filtered through their personal agendas and mythologies. So what is perfectly clear to one person can be entirely antithetical to another's ‘perfectly clear' point of view, which makes for some interesting and passionate exchanges. We subconsciously delete anything that doesn't fit into our neatly constructed world view and we cling to what we believe in sometimes with far too much tenacity. There isn't much room for movement when people insist their truths are the only truths.

Ultimately there is no definitive central reality, only the endless myriad of individual perceptions. We can't be sure of anything at all and we certainly can't count on anything staying the same. I try not to let people hurt me. Being hurt is a choice. I try not to let other people's perceptions of me cloud my view of myself. No matter how ‘good' you are, everyone isn't going to love you, because they're looking at you through their own lenses.

The best we can do is to live our lives and focus on the friends who stay around, even when it's cloudy, even when we act like an arse, even when we're mired in the muck of day to day life, and especially at these times. If we have a small handful of true friends like that, if we have even one true friend like that, we are incredibly lucky. I think the best we can do is to be the kind of a friend we desire and trust that the people who drift away will return if they're meant to do so or perhaps they won't. Even though accepting that is a painful proposition sometimes.


Contemplatively yours,
Margot