Dear ex-best friend,

First of all, let me say that I’m sorry. I’m sorry for writing this, I’m sorry for how it went down, I’m sorry that I didn’t appreciate you while I was your friend.

And truth be told, I miss you. I do. I miss asking you advice. I miss somebody knowing that good ole back story of my past. It's too messy to get into, but you understand.

As morbid as it sounds I’ve sort of been acting like you died. Like somewhere among the muck of how we left things off, you are no longer accessible to me. I feel like whenever I need advice from someone not involved, my thought process is: "Well I could go to you, but that connection isn’t there anymore."

And when we stopped talking it killed a part of me. But it’s strange. It’s not the part I figured would die.

The part of me that died was the part that stood in front of a room of about 700 people and considered myself better, because I know someone that killed themself, that I knew addicts, that I knew the week my mom was getting paid because that’s when we would get to go grocery shopping, that I knew troubled souls. I thought that I was better because I was a troubled soul. I thought I was better because I have issues, and I thought nobody else did.

And I think I thought that because you were always so perfect, I didn’t know how to see myself, so I compressed myself into this mold. And the mold somehow took my struggle and raised me up above the rest of my peers.

And somehow when we stopped talking, I realized I wasn’t better because of my issues. I had placed myself on a pedestal, and when we stopped talking and the spotlight went out, when I could see the crowd, I realized that nobody gave a flying fuck if I had issues. Nobody cared. They were all living their own lives and building relationships, but there I was on the pedestal hating myself because I felt stuck. But all I had to do was jump down.

You were my security blanket. The way I could ignore everyone else and say, “Well, I must not think I am better than everyone else because look here, I have a few friends.”

But our situation made me realize that nobody really gives a shit about my problems or my schedule or anything else for that matter. Everyone else was living their own lives, and I had built up this barrier so much that I wasn’t actually a part of my own life.

So then I went into college after a couple months of tearing down my little stand, and I met the most fantastic people. And it forced me to tell my backstory, it forced me to reflect on how I have been living with you the past 18 years.

And I’ve thought about calling you, I really have. But I’m so afraid. I’m so afraid I will shape myself back into that mold that I am so afraid to go back into. And I don’t like that girl anymore. I like the fact that right now I am sitting in the library crying and shaking, and I don’t have to cover it up. I don’t have to pretend like I have no emotions. I don’t have to magnify my issues in order to find an identity.

I like the new me. The new me that doesn’t have to fit into a category of “badass” or “boss bitch.” And for a while, I thought that you had placed me into that category, but now I realize that I did that to myself because I was so intimidated by your perfection, I had to magnify my problems, just to spite the perfection.

So thank you for being there for the last 18 years, knowing the backstory and caring about the backstory.

I still don’t know where I would be without you

And I’m sorry I blamed you for the identity crisis I gave myself.

Good Luck.