Dear Swastika,
I am messed up. Like, totally messed up! I am a sixteen-year-old, and I haven’t got much to do other than studies. I am having a real hard time with one of my really good friends. I had just completed my SLC and had to go to Pokhara for a small getaway. And it turned out to be the worst. When I returned, I found that one of my friends had ‘decided’ not to talk with me. “For what?”, only she knows. I got this really bitter sweet message of hers, with a conclusion that she won’t be talking to me. Wow, Wonderful surprise! And she didn’t care to reply any of my questions. I asked some of her friends who said that according to her, I was ‘over-protective’ and was too expressive (whatever that meant). I see her every day in the corridors of our college and it hurts to see such a close person turning her face so baselessly!  How should I approach this situation?
— Bob

You’re sixteen. Life is bound to get messed up every now and then. So don’t worry too much. People will come and go. Tides will rise and fall. Some days will be sunny, and some days it will rain. As you move ahead in life, you will find many people, make several friends. Some of them will drive you crazy and some will keep you sane. And rarely you will meet friends who call you “over-protective” and “expensive”, who in their own mean ways, push you to reflect on your own life and how people perceive you.

If your friend has made a decision to not talk to you, then there is nothing you can do about it. Chasing her down will make things worse. Like Newton’s law, every action has equal and opposite reaction. The more you chase, the more she’s going to run away. So chill. You have to respect that she might not know how to talk to you about this or may be doesn’t feel comfortable to talk to you in person. She, for whatever reason, had to leave you and you might or might never find out the entire truth. Some things are simply not within the locus of your control. However, what is within your control is to keep your door open for her to come back someday and tell you what went wrong. You can tell her that you valued the friendship that you shared with her. You can let her know that whenever she feels ready to talk to you, you’d like to really understand where you went wrong. Keep the door open and give an open invitation. But, remember that you also have the choice the shut your door on her and never let this bother you again. Do what feels like the right thing for you and whatever you feel you are able to handle right now.

But use this incident and time to do some self reflection. You know, they say that there are four corners of self – things you know about yourself that others also know, things that you know about yourself but others don’t know about you, things that neither you or others know about you, and things that you don’t know about yourself but other’s know about you. The more we know about our self, we become more and more liberated, our life becomes more stable and life stops getting messed up so often. So if she is telling you something that you didn’t know about yourself, just listen, reflect, keep things that are useful and throw away what doesn’t make sense. Like I said, life offers very few friends like these who can open you to the corner of yourself which others can see but you don’t.

Swastika Shrestha is the co-founder and head of training and support at Teach for Nepal. She has several years of experience training and mentoring youth leaders. She can be reached at swastika@teachfornepal.org.

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