Failing as a friend

We all like to lie our online and pretend that our lives are peachy keen. Take a look at my Facebook and you'll think that all I do is run around on different adventures. If you only knew me through Facebook you wouldn't know that I have a job or bad days or a menstrual cycle. You'll rarely see there photos of boredom or sadness or anger. You won't see status updates about fighting with my friends or all of my buckets of self hatred that overflow sometimes.

Well, here it is, my admitting that things aren't always that great.

I'm not always a good friend.

Sometimes I feel alone, even when I have a dozen people around me who love me. I feel like I'm the only one to experience reversed culture shock. I'm the only one who has ever been broken hearted. I'm the only one to ever feel homesick, to feel worthless, to feel far from God.

I'm the only one to feel all those normal things that we all feel but don't post online.

It was hard for me to find a photo of me looking sad. Nobody takes sad photos.

I took this for a communications training to show hiding identity in a photo.

And when I feel these things, and feel alone in that, I assume that my friends and family won't understand. And I don't talk about it. And sometimes I can't explain it, and I look like a bitch. Fact.

And my friends and family get frustrated because I'm not acting like myself. And in my mind I think, "Why can't they understand where I'm coming from? Why can't they give me the benefit of the doubt that I care about them, that I want to be there for them, but I can't be there for anyone right now?"

Because you won't talk to them, dummy!

So to everyone in Omaha and Alabama and New York and elsewhere who has called me a bad friend recently, you might be right. I would probably refer to myself as an "absent" friend rather than a "bad" one, but I get it. And I'm sorry.

To hear that I'm "inconsiderate" and "annoying" more than once in the past month, that's probably right, too. I have been considering my own feelings more than everyone's.

So instead of being pissed off that my friends don't ask me about my life abroad or what I do for a living, I need to look inward and ask myself what I've done for them lately.

As Louis C.K. once said, I need to not assume that MY feelings should be everyone else's top priority. Easier said than done.