Dear Digital Diary

Dear Digital Diary,

I can’t keep having the same conversations. 

I’m really good at buying plants and planting them and watching them for a little while, but come the colder months, I tend to pay less attention. 

The plants, if pertaining to my life, are the friends I collect. I’m great at finding them, maintaining them for a little while, but when I find that, when I’m mentally in a “cold weather” month (or week or day), it’s difficult for me to check in and make sure the plants are still doing alright. 

See, if it happened for one singular season, then it’s whatever. But I’ve had a few of my plants from my garden tell me they wish I paid more attention to them. And while they’re in the right, that maintaining consistent effort helps them to grow, am I also in the right for not trying to tend to my garden when it’s wintertime?

What’s a Bad Friend?

It was the fourth time a friend had come to me saying she wished I put more effort into our friendship that I realized, perhaps, I could be a bad friend. If my friends didn’t feel I cared about them, then was I really their friend at all?

But technically, I wasn’t a bad friend—not entirely. I’m not abusive, not narcissistic, not only using them for leverage or money or to provide free therapy. Now that being said, I’m not saying I don’t have the flaws that some bad friends have. I’m a notorious flake. I know this. I disappear when I have a mental health flare, and I have horrible communication skills. I’m not great at balancing my feelings versus the feelings of others, so there’s a time when I pour into their cup and everyone else in my life so much that there’s nothing left in mine, leaving me drained and in need of rest. 

So I step back for a moment without realizing it. I need alone time. Now that looks different for everybody: for me, that looks like running errands, going to work, reading a book, or running all by myself. For my sister, that’s knitting under a tree in the backyard. For my boyfriend, it’s camping deep in the woods for days. 

Alone time is not only normal, it’s a necessity. Some people do need it, though, more than others, and if you’re on the lesser scale, I’m sure it’s hard to understand. But that doesn’t make me a bad friend.

My Priorities, Your Priorities

I’m not one to text 24/7. Besides Spotify and social media (that’s just me posting and beating the algorithm to see if I can make some quick cash), I avoid using my phone as much as possible. I’m also someone who kind of does their own thing on most days. And even if I post, nobody really knows all that’s going on. I know we all know the concept that social media is fake, but then when we apply it to real people in our lives, we can sometimes forget.

So I don’t text. But I also never forget a birthday. I may not make plans, but I’ll send gifts in the mail for no reason. I won’t be attached at the hip, but I’ll always be there when you need me.

And maybe that’s not the friend for you. I’m an air plant type of friend. I don’t need water to keep me alive, or in friendship terms, I don’t need constant attention for the friendship to be maintained. But some people are more like sunflowers, who need a fair amount of sunlight to function. And then there’s a parlor palm, which doesn’t need a lot of sunlight and will dry up if it gets the same amount as a sunflower. 

Sometimes it may be hard to coexist with each other.

A New Age

Despite the fact that we think we know everything at 18, then nothing at 22, we’re all learning at different rates, with unique experiences and individual anxieties. The one thing we should all have, however, is empathy. Empathy for the fact that friends won’t be carbon copies of yourself, and while friendships are relationships, they are usually based upon proximity as opposed to similarity, meaning your friends will be different from you. 

And with age comes the ability to practice agency. If it’s not working for you, then don’t entertain it. But perhaps open communication would be effective. 

Because nobody likes finding out from a TikTok repost that you’ve been purposely not texting as a way to test if they’ll text first. What a juvenile practice that is, while also holding the expectation of an adult friendship.

– Mia