Of friends and "friends"

"Never explain yourself. Your friends don't need it and your enemies won't believe it."

First of all I would like to thank you all for your sweet comments and touching e-mails as a response to my previous post. Rick is right, there are a lot of people all over the world who cares for me. Thank you for cheering me up at a time when I really need it. My heart is still not in her perfect pink, glittering state, but at least she's not a black hole anymore. Thank you for making me feel I am not alone. Special mention also goes to my friends from the office Mich and Marsha. I thank God I have you as my friends. :)

Today's post is also about friendship.

Let me borrow Sylvia Plath's words, "I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends." I place high value to my friends and if I consider you one, then rest assured that I will be a great friend to you. If I like you, I really really like you and I can gush all day about how much I appreciate you. On the other hand, if I don't like you (or you did something to me that made me lose my trust in you) then I won't stress myself in trying to foster a healthy relationship with you. The way I see it, it's better to ignore you than to pretend to be your friend and then launch a tirade against you when you're not there. I am not one to act all nice in front of you, then spread nasty things about you when you're not around.

A little bit something about how I relate to people around me: I've always been a transparent person who proudly and admittedly wears her heart on her sleeve. My emotions are very easy to read. I am emotional and sensitive, to a fault. As what Marsha and I have talked about last night, displaying a poker face is something both she and I cannot do. If I am upset about something, I am visibly upset due to my inner debate whether to tell the offending person or not. And yes, I end up telling him/ her that what he/ she did made me upset (in a nice and tactful way, of course). We talk about it, deal with it, and move on, like mature adults. As much as possible I try to get everything out in the open so the offense will not be repeated and we can all move on.

Because I am like this, I naively expected other people would treat me the same way. If I did something wrong or anything  that upset any of my friends, I would want them to tell me directly, in private, so I can do something about it. I am not perfect and I can be really stubborn sometimes, so when that happens I would prefer a telling off and a smack in the head than a stab at the back. Sadly, others take the cowardly way out and hide behind status updates in social networking sites. Ironic that I am posting it here instead of talking it out with the person, yes? Honestly I don't know how I am going to deal with it as I am still too upset to talk with the person.

I am not going to lie, it hurt and it made me really upset (and all this when I was just beginning to be cheered up again after my depressing post last week).  Doubly more so when I saw the person the next day, looking really happy to see me. When that happens, what do you believe? It's not so much as the words that were said as the pain of the "betrayal" I felt. Now I don't know how long the person's been holding a grudge against me, or if I have done anything else that made the person act this way towards me. I know that we can't really please everyone and someone is bound to not like us, but the way I learned of this, I felt like I was bitch-slapped. Twice.

What I learned from this "surprise"? I learned to value my true and real friends even more.

*Photo taken by Mae and edited by me.