What I Wish I’d Known Before…
Just when you think a writing task can’t get any harder than last week’s ‘This Is Me’ topic, you’re forced to sit down and write about something completely personal. Nothing good is ever said before the statement “I wish I knew that at the time” and I intend to stick to that. After spending a few days thinking about what brutal life experience I wanted to share with you all, whether it be about a parent’s divorce or a bad meal, I decided I would be completely honest. Quite frankly, out of everything, what I truly wish I’d known before is…
Friends can break your heart too.
Now this may not come as a shock to some of you, I’m sure we have all been hurt or upset by those we hold close. But the life experience I am talking about quite literally changed my life forever.
Let’s go back to the start…
Eleven-year-old me makes friends with a girl at secondary school, the kind of friend that you spend every waking moment with, the type that you swear will be your best friend forever and tell everybody that you’re sisters because the term “best friend” just isn’t close enough. So here we are, two little girls, completely inseparable for roughly eight years. Growing up together, helping each other through exams, breakups, diets, parent’s separations, more breakups and more diets; until that one thing happened.
By the age of eighteen, both the girls, who are no longer little, are studying their A-Levels or equivalent; both are involved in their first serious relationships and working towards getting to university. They form a group of the two couples and meet up frequently. Everything was working out, everyone got on with each other and things seemed to be perfect. Little did I know, that my best friend, and my boyfriend, were getting on a little too well. I shan’t be graphic with the details, but as a reader I assume you know where that storyline ends. Skipping forward a month or two, eighteen-year-old me is mourning the loss of her boyfriend and her best friend, whilst trying to complete my A-Levels and avoid bumping into any unwanted company on a night out.
It’s safe to say life was tough.
I’m aware that I am not the first person this has happened to, and I’m positive that I shall not be the last, but in all honesty I couldn’t have prepared myself for the effect this was going to make on my life. I became very sick, very quickly. Like most teenage girls after splitting up with their boyfriends, I adopted the ‘heartbreak diet’. This is a nice term we like to use which basically means you don’t eat for a week or two, lose a tone of weight and then move on with your life feeling better than ever. However, this isn’t exactly how it went down for me. I lost roughly a stone in the first month and I was miserable. I was sad about my boyfriend of course, but the fact I had just lost who I thought to be my best friend in the entire world was heartbreaking. I became obsessed with my image. I wanted to know what it was, why it happened, what I could change in order to prevent it happening again; did I have the wrong hair length, did I do my makeup the wrong way, did I weigh too much, were my clothes too quirky; anything and everything you could think of, I criticized myself for.
Now, almost three years on, I can see that it wasn’t any of those factors, and no amount of hunger or gym memberships was going to change that. Sometimes the people you love, do horrible things, and sometimes, those people are your best friends.
With thanks to Rebekah Tennant
