Sometimes It Ain't Fun & Games

The thing with the insides of my head is that sometimes they are not funny party stories. Sometimes they are the philosophical bullshit that I pull out from the recesses that I like to analyze with people from time to time. Sometimes some of you will review them with me and I LOVE that. I really enjoy it at 2 in the morning after several bottles of wine, but I don't always remember it then.

But, it's like this. It's Full Heather Jacket here at Inside Heather's Head -- sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it ain't. You take it all when you sign up.

With that in mind, since my last gossip update I've thought a lot about the friend thing. I thought about the people who continue to try to keep me in their lives, even though I'm evasive. I've also thought about the people who I have tried to keep in my life, even though they are evasive. Some of the people in the latter group have turned to me time and time again when things aren't going well in their lives and I have always tried to be there for them -- and then when things are going well and I want to share in that too (who wouldn't?), they don't have the time to keep in touch.

The thing I have to remind myself of time and time again is that we are all at different places on our journey. On this walk through our lives. Some people we have to work harder to keep up with and some people have to work harder to keep up with us. If I am not going to make the effort to try to keep in touch with people who work so hard to keep me in their lives, then I simply cannot feel bitter about the people who treat me the same way. It's a pattern, it's a circle, it's just the way that it is.

I do feel bad about friends that I have let drift away. I do try to keep that going. The honest truth is that sometimes it just wears me out to catch up. How's so and so, how's such and such, what's happened since 1998 when we last REALLY talked?? Yuck! And I know this is part of it for those who don't make the effort to keep up with me. They've got their own things going on that are IMMEDIATE (family, closer friends, jobs, etc) and you lose the ability to stretch it out past more than a couple of layers. It doesn't mean that you don't care about the people in the other layers, they just didn't happen to get into the innermost fabric of your life.

Shit happens.

I want to talk about "best friends" too, because I stirred up something interesting with that this week but we'll save that for another time.

For now, I'll say that if you have one really GOOD friend that you can trust with your innermost YOU -- then you should count yourself as lucky. That's more than a lot of people have. I know that sounds like some cheesy internet forward shit, but I think it's true.