Dear Saffron:
I’m lost in the drama of someone else’s life.
I live with a good friend, lets call her L, who is depressed. By depressed I mean the ‘taking-meds-to-survive-never-happy’ kind. I know that a lot of people won’t agree with that description, but it describes what I live with to a T. To make things even tougher, L and I are both undergraduate students at university.
I’ve known L for 5 years. We met in first year. It took a couple of weeks of constant hanging out before she confided in me that she was depressed. I was wowed. I had never before known someone who was medically depressed and took drugs for it. This didn’t stop us from becoming best friends. BFFs. I hadn’t had a friend like L before. She was brutually honest about anything that I asked about: how had she been depressed; what meds she took; what it felt like to be depressed; had she tried to take her own life; anything I wanted to know and she would tell me. It was eye opening. And let’s face it, the sharing wasn’t a one way street. I came from a rural area, she came from a big city. She had tons of questions for me too. We bonded over being honest with each other… of course we had similar likes and dislikes and we were in a bunch of the same classes.
In second year, half-way through the first semester, L got sick and the university clinic doctor prescribed antibiotics for her. She ended up having to go home and withdrawing from her courses because the antibiotics caused her anti-depressants to stop working. She crashed. Hard. I didn’t let this end our friendship. I called everyday, I sent her cards; I did anything I could think of to let her know that I was still here, thinking about her. Before she had left, L and I were as close as any sisters could be. Her going home didn’t really change that. When she finally returned to school, I was more than ready to pick up where we had left off. It was then that I learned that L wasn’t the same fun loving L that she had been. She was different: more quiet, less sure of herself. I adapted to the ‘new’ her. I didn’t care what she was like, I was just glad that she had come back to school. Third and fourth year were full of fun and friends. It was great.
This is our fifth year together, and I have to say it has been the hardest so far. L and I seem to be drifting apart. It isn’t that I don’t love her, my family practically adopted her, it’s that she takes advantage of the fact that I consider her family. L knows that I would do anything for her. It has gotten to the point where I just don’t want to be around her. Then I remember that she is my best friend and would always be there for me. Today the clinic doctor told L that she is dysfunctional and has no coping skills. And it is true, she can’t function by herself. And she really has no coping skills. It was just pointed out to me that I enable her destructive behavior of not getting herself help when she clearly needs it. I am apparently supposed to bust out the hard love routine. How do I tell someone that I consider to be a sister that I will only willing to help her if she is willing to get herself help? How do I look her in the eyes and say no?
I don’t think that I can.
But, her problems are taking over my life. My school work is slipping because I am so concentrated on what she is doing with her life. I am so overwhelmed with making sure that she has everything she needs to function, that I forget to look after myself. I just don’t know what to do. But I know that I have to something. I can’t continue on like this.
Anxiously waiting,
A
