Thinking in Print

For a long time now, I have been struggling with feelings of anxiety and depression and what has been weighing most heavily on my mind lately is the broken relationship between me and my best friend. I love my best friend dearly and she has been through so much in these past few years. What seemed to cause the shift in our friendship was when she started doing drugs and hanging out with other people. I had tried so hard to be the best friend she needed and to always be there for her when she needed it. I knew many of the other people she was friends with, and that the majority of them were bad influences on her but there wasn’t much I could do other than try to be a support system in her time of need.

I watched my best friend begin to fade away into a person I no longer knew and then when we graduated high school, we just stopped hanging out. Before that, I was basically the only person who really tried to be there for her. Her parents tried to keep her out of trouble but failed because they were too harsh on her and ended up pushing her away.

Last year, we hung out one time and I found out she had recently been addicted to meth and that she had been through rehab. I never even knew about it before then because we hadn’t talked in so long. I was deeply upset about it because in my heart she’s still my best friend even though we no longer have the best relationship.

There was so much that I had wanted to tell her but I didn’t know how or when, or if I even had the guts to say what I was thinking out loud to anyone, let alone her. Recently, I have tried on many occasions to make contact with her through social media and text but it seems that she either has too much going on to really talk and have a conversation, she’s no longer interested in talking to me, or some other unknown reason. There is still so much that has been left unsaid.

I wasn’t sure how to cope with the things I was feeling. I felt like I was grieving over my best friend as if she had died, even though she is very much still alive. One day, I was so upset about it that I decided to write a letter to my best friend telling her everything that was going through my mind and that was causing me so much pain. It seemed like I had typed and typed for hours on end. I ended up with more than four pages worth of thoughts and I cried the whole way through this process. I never sent the letter, but after writing it, I felt much better and much more at peace in my own mind than I had felt before. The process of writing out those thoughts and getting them out of my mind and making something constructive out of them, was therapeutic to me. I just wanted to share that strategy with my readers because it was so much more powerful than one might think it would be.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to take care of yourselves!

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