Tag: friendship

prideprejudce:

prideprejudce:

here’s a hard pill to swallow: abuse does not just exclusively occur in romantic or family relationships. friends can be just as toxic to your physical and mental wellbeing as a partner or a family member. also, the aftermath of being in an abusive friendship can be just as traumatizing as any other abusive relationship. don’t boo me i’m right 

for some reason people don’t know this but toxic friends can mirror all the same behaviors as seen in an abusive romantic partner. i will use my own story of my ex-high school best friend who abused me for several years. signs of abuse include but are not limited to:

  1. Humiliating or embarrassing you – my ex-best friend LOVED to try and make me squirm in any way possible to see my reaction. once she went up to a guy and told him i had a crush on him to watch me struggle to explain myself
  2. Unreasonable jealousy – if i so much as went to hang out with any of my other friends i would have to let my ex-best friend know beforehand. i pretty much had to get her permission to see other people or she would be convinced that i was ‘ditching her forever’
  3. Refusing to communicate – if she was ever angry with me or upset she would never tell me that so we could talk about it. instead, she would ignore me or respond to all my texts with ‘k’ or ‘ya’ and i would have to struggle for hours to get her to tell me what was wrong
  4. Ignoring or excluding you – she would ignore me for weeks at a time as a ‘punishment’ knowing that it would eat me up inside wondering what i did wrong. i still remember spending nights wide awake crying in bed because i didn’t know what to do 
  5. Mean jokes or constantly making fun of you – she would constantly poke fun at my appearance and personality to where my self-confidence plummeted. god help me if i ever said anything about her though
  6. Saying things like “If you don’t _____, I will_____.” – she would constantly threaten to kill herself if i didn’t do what she wanted
  7. Guilt trips – she never apologized once to me in our seven-plus years of being friends. not once. every time we argued i would be the one who apologized in the end. once when i stood up to her and called her out on treating me like crap she would make up a story of how her life was miserable and that i was making things worse 
  8. Isolating you from friends and family – been mentioned before but she was extremely jealous of all my other relationships and would override my plans with other people on purpose and would guilt trip me if i still went to see them
  9.  Domination and control – also mentioned before but i needed her permission on everything. if i joined any group or extracurricular activity without her knowing she would be furious   
  10. Extreme moodiness – after ignoring me for weeks she would contact me out of the blue and act as if nothing happened. she would also refuse to talk about why she ignored me for so long and did not care if my mental health suffered from it

anyway, abusive friendships need to be acknowledged more because they are not only extremely common but also very damaging to someone’s mental health. i personally had to go through years of therapy to unlearn the guilt and self-hatred that my ex-friend helped instill in me. stay safe yall

I probably should say that most of the time it’s safer to go up a shoe size if you’re in doubt.

Just remembering that time I was in a friend’s wedding, and she decided we should go for these matching dyed pumps. As happens with wedding parties.

That maybe wouldn’t have been so bad if the shop had my size in stock when we went in to try them on. But, of course the closest pair was a little tight.

“Sure, let’s go ahead and order in the size up, I’m sure that will be fine.”

Spoiler: It wasn’t fine. And it was too late by the time they came to try something else. I would have been better off with the ones I tried on.

The Sasquatch-sized pair they ordered in seemed to be a different brand, with different sizing. So I got stuck in heels that felt at least 2 sizes too big. They didn’t really want to stay on, it was that great a fit.

So, I tried insoles and stuffed the toes with paper. Which put a lot of my weight onto the toes crumpling themselves down against the toe paper, instead of on the balls of the feet. Besides the blisters.

(And of course I forgot to pack along comfier shoes for the reception. It was too cold to just go without, though I seriously considered it anyway. So it was pretty much all day stuck in those horrible shoes.)

I’m not sure if any toes actually ended up broken, or “just” dislocated. (Thank you lousy collagen. 😩) There was a lot of bruising, and walking was not easy for a couple of weeks afterwards.

Now I would just say, “Sorry, I’m just going to have to wear non-matching shoes. These are not working at all.” Even if I didn’t have diabetic foot issues to keep in mind.

That was over 15 years ago, though, and I felt like I needed to good sport my way through in horrible shoes.

Also a cautionary tale, I suppose. Please don’t do that. 😱

moranion:

fierceawakening:

shytimesabandonableplatform:

fierceawakening:

discoursedrome:

fierceawakening:

http://kunaigirl.tumblr.com/post/173012902181/guayabaprince-gay-culture-is-speedrunning

things like this puzzle me just because finding real friends is so damn rare

if i had to exclude cishets from the running in principle, i’d be pretty lonely

i mean a lot of my friends are queer but dude what

this tumblr thing puzzles me more and more with each passing day

Hmm. I remember somewhere reading a bit by someone who had visiting a foreign culture where he didn’t speak the language and hit it off with the only other American there, and they bonded quite strongly over the course of that trip and made plans to meet up back in America, but when they did, he found that they didn’t actually have that much of a connection, and in the foreign country it was simply their unique shared experiences in a sea of foreignness that gave them a sense of closeness.

The linked post seems like it might be the same sort of thing. Friendships tend naturally to continue along at the same level of intensity until there’s a “breakthrough” that drops you down to a deeper friend level, and that can take a long time, but if you’re able to share a close personal experience with someone that the rest of society is unable to relate to – something that maies you feel alienated normally – that can drop you into a very high level of intimacy almost immediately. That can be valuable since it happens when it’s most needed, but it has the drawback alluded to in the story I mentioned: the initial similarity is rarely enough to support a lasting and functional relationship, so when the dust settles you may find yourself on extremely familiar terms with someone you just aren’t that into.

Yeah. That was basically my experience with the kink scene—since those were THE ONLY PEOPLE I COULD TRUST WITH MY HORRIBLE SECRET I trusted them immediately and fully.

I made a lot of real friends, yes!

but I also got way too close to some iffy people way too quickly. And found myself going “what the HELL?” fairly often when the shiny wore off.

That’s why I feel so uneasy when I see kids here going “queer GOOD cishet BAD.” Because the actual fault line for “this person is a true friend” isn’t “this person has similar life experiences to me.” It’s “this person is someone I consistently like and respect.”

That can be someone who shares a lot of traits with you OR someone who shares almost none.

This was also my experience with the kink scene, which was also my first experience with the Queer Scene (as opposed to just queer people, who I’ve been around all my life :P). Insta-connection based on a shared, deep, stigmatized part of How We Worked.

That insta-connection sure made a good bond for abusive people to fall back on. “Oh, she’d never rape anyone, she teaches consent classes, she’s one of us!” She was more involved in the scene so she had more connections, and I was the weird critical outsider (I thought I was an insider) and I had to be a liar because she couldn’t have done what I claimed. Except she did, and I hope she doesn’t do it again, but I have little confidence.

Be careful out there, folks. Someone can have all sorts of things in common with you, someone can “get” you on a truly deep level, someone can volunteer for wonderful causes and write amazing theory, and that someone can still abuse you.

100%. I stayed with an abusive girlfriend because I was a feminist and the other feminists around me kept saying “there is no power dynamic in lesbian relationships like there is in straight ones.”

Which my brainweasels interpreted as “whatever this is, it isn’t a power dynamic. You must deserve this.”

It took me a while to not give a damn what it was and decide it was ok to “fail at being gay.”

All great points above, but also, being queer/gay/lgbt/whatever doesn’t actually necessarily mean you’ll have the same experience being that as other lgbt people around you. That’s what confuses me, personally, when people go on these extended tangents about how great and necessary it is to have friends that are gay/women/your ethnicity/your whatever, etc., just like you, and how you’ll be instant friends bc of that shared experience, bc … it doesn’t really work like that?? 

so many lgbt people have the experience of being that – that’s completely different from my own. on top of that, there are plenty of lgbt people I just don’t like hanging out with for various reasons. also plenty of women i can’t stand. and plenty of nonbinary people. we may have smth in common, but we still have a bunch more things very much NOT in common.