The One Where You Begin to Realize 'Friends' Was All A Lie

Long time, no blog post!

To say that the past 7-8 months have been the most intense months of my life, would be an understatement. I finished out the summer of 2019 doing my boring, useless internship in New York, came back to finish out my final semester of college (taking 5 classes, working part-time, and completing a remote internship), graduated from college, got a job back in New York City, got promoted within four weeks... all to have been laid off this past week because of COVID-19.

Just thinking about having been laid off, albeit 'temporarily', is still a bit hard to digest. This past weekend has been filled with lots of cheap champagne, Netflix, lying on the bed while scrolling through the same social media posts over, and over, and over. Today, it was hard to even get out of bed and make myself food. That whole journey is another blog post.

I'm on day 10 (or 11) of self-quarantining, and I've had the apartment to myself for the past week. It's been nice to be able to walk freely in my underwear, play my music as loud as I want to, read my books on the living room couch instead of in my bed, and leave my dishes out after I've cooked for over an hour and not worry about getting complaints. But at the same time, I wish I had someone I could share that feeling with. And I find myself thinking of everything I expected moving to New York City to feel like.

I knew Friends was mostly a lie about the realities of living in Manhattan, but as a self-diagnosed Monica, I'd always thought I'd have a Ross or a Phoebe around. I hoped to find a Rachel within my new roommates, but none of us are ever home, or a Joey at work (that's not going to be happening anytime soon). And although a Chandler is not something I feel like I'm looking for right now, a girl might think about keeping her options open!

Rachel Green and Monica Gellar lived in a quite luxurious two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment somewhere in the West Village. How they managed to afford that apartment, considering we hardly ever saw them really work, was always one of the greatest mysteries surrounding Friends. But to me, the bigger mystery was on how they all even managed to stay friends for the ten years we got to see on TV.

The thing is, all of the mains were shitty people. Ross embodies toxic masculinity, not wanting his son to be caught playing with Barbies and thinking men should be above being nannies. Monica was neurotic about needing to be in control and clean and organized, especially in her apartment. Maybe that doesn't make her a shitty person, but can you imagine living with her? It doesn't really make you want to go out for drinks with her on Friday nights.

Similarly, in that vein, Phoebe is a great comic relief but not someone necessarily reliable at keeping secrets or bringing you up when you're feeling down (i.e, Phoebe and Chandler's entire friendship). Chandler will hook up with one of your sisters, forget which one it was, and on top of that – and then fall in love with the girl you're dating! Rachel was self-absorbed and immature in the beginning, and Joey, bless his heart, was a womanizing sex-addict.

Yes, these are mostly generalizations! No, I do not think each character on Friends was an absolute villain. But it needs to be said, for the purposes of this post, that they were kind of shitty people at times.

Yet, at the end of the day, at the end of an episode, a season, and the overall series, they remained friends. They were each other's family, until relationships became more and more serious and they started developing families of their own. To this day, even the cast still hangs out and made plans for a reunion special, that is unfortunately put on hold due to COVID-19. (I'm also in no-way saying that the cast is full of shitty people. Their friendship is lovely, so to speak!)

What I am saying is that Friends gives us this perception that you're somehow going to find your community of people and you're all going to love each other through your flaws and your mistakes.

What happens when you've reached your early twenties, and you begin to wonder if you're never going to find that community? It's easy to say that as a recent college graduate, I'm having this mid-life crisis far too early. After all, Rachel was only 24 or 25 when she skipped out on her wedding in the pilot episode and reunited with Monica and company. But this has been a perpetual life feeling. As early as I can remember, in the sixth grade or so, I've been hoping to find my best friend. Someone who understands me as I understand them, who takes all my weird quirks and banters back with their own, someone who is as proud of me as I want to be of their achievements.

Friends have come and gone in my life. I'm more used to falling out with friends than I am with them staying around. Some might say I have abandonment issues and some have said that straight to my face. All in all, I've become so used to being cautious around potential new friends that I keep my guard up at all times. I deflect questions rather than talk about my personal experiences and always let the conversations be about the other person.

I talk with my therapist about this, and she claims it's not me. It's the people I'm around, people my age are immature and so self-centered, she claims. But I can't help wondering if it is me. Maybe I inflate my own sense of ego in thinking that I'm a great listener and will always help people out when they're going through a tough time, but maybe I don't actually say the right things after all. Maybe I focus too much on the negatives than I do the positives and it affects the energy of the people I'm around. Maybe because I'm so emotionally aloof, I can't create that special bond of "let's be psychos together" I'm anxiously trying to find.

I know we never like to think of ourselves as the antagonists in the movie of our lives, but I have to think that I am. I must unconsciously constantly be thwarting all of my attempts to achieve happiness, or even a grain of contentedness. For example, instead of talking to my friends and family today, I suffered through four hour-long episodes of Carnival Row on Amazon Prime (that I only watched for Orlando Bloom... that show is a fucking trip) and stalked Tyler C and Hannah B on Instagram Lives. Instead of finding euphoria/serotonin from people who are actually in my lives, I only know how to look for it from people who will never know I exist!!!

I'm writing this blog post because of a particular situation I'm going through with a friend, that may or may not be one-sided. I feel like I'm being ignored and not prioritized, while that friend might feel the same way. That friend might not even intentionally be doing this, but this has been the longest we've ever not spoken and I can't help but feel like it's intentional.

This blog post also comes off the heat of me being promoted and not feeling like I should specifically reach out to any of my friends, that they should congratulate me. Yes, I hear how petty it sounds now, but at the time, I thought me reposting a story someone mentioned me on Instagram meant that all my friends should take the hint and congratulate me. My notifications should have been blow up with all of them saying "I'm so proud of you!" but they weren't, and in the end, it's my own damn fault for having such expectations that no one ever lives up to.

Possibly because I don't tell them to. Possibly because I don't live up to theirs. Possibly because I am shitty and I just don't realize that other people have caught onto it. I live my life off of this motto that Troye Sivan said he heard from Gigi (or Bella) Hadid: "There’s always going to be someone who is more talented than you, who is better looking than you, so your only choice - your only chance - is to be nicer than them and make people want to work with you more."

I always strive to be the nicest in the room and one of the things I always hear people say about me is that I'm such a nice girl, I'm so sweet. But maybe the people who have come and gone have seen the cracks slip in my facade and focused more on the negatives than the positives. Maybe I spent too much time trying to be the perfect best friend I've always wanted to find for myself, than I spent actually trying to be a good friend.

Most of my creative work focuses on toxic friendships and failed friendships that don't last through the growing up period, or idealized versions of friendships I wish I could have. One of my favorite movies is Me Without You and a book that tremendously helped me when I was growing up was The Kind of Friends We Used to Be. But I also really enjoy watching Friends and How I Met Your Mother, because they're TV shows: they're communities of people that have built up these friendships and relationships over years and years and they've proven to work. They're proof that friends can come and actually stick around, that you might actually feel like if you really needed someone to be there for you when you got temporarily laid off, they would.

But it's reason why I say, in the end, maybe Friends was all a lie, is because even if you are a shitty person, you're not going to have that many friends after all.