Cutting People off – Patricia

Right. Continuing on from my last blog, I’m going to run through the people who were once close to me and subsequently got dropped along the way.


First up is Patricia. We were friends in secondary school and carried on being friends for a long time afterwards. Her problem was she had serious self esteem issues. She was one of those unlucky ones who had a rough time in school so she felt she had something to prove when she left. She did this by slimming down, fixing her hair, nails, and wearing scandalous clothes. These ofcourse generated a lot of interest from guys – a lot of whom were the ones you used to make fun of her in school. In some twisted sense of logic – seeing as she was soo hot now and everyone wanted her – she figured she could sleep with whomever and as many people as she wanted, and it would be all good! Let’s just say, she slept with a LOT of guys – the stories were never ending. Now this didn’t bother me as I’m non-judgemental. Heck I have friends now who are just as bad as she was then. I just figured that she was a grown woman who could live her life as she sees fit. Her actions had no reflection on me – I believe I’m a strong enough personality on my own to not be judged by my friends’ actions.


Where the problem lay was that she was soo insecure about the way she looked and the way people perceived her, that she always sought to put other people down to make herself feel better. She always had to be the best dressed person there (read scandalous) and the one who had all the male attention. I don’t knock people for what they are wearing as long as it suits them. She had a nice figure and could carry off a lot of the things she wore. What used to piss me off is she’d make fun of what I was wearing or try and make me feel bad cos I hadn’t styled my hair properly or what I was wearing didn’t match. Now a lot of the time I just didn’t send, sometimes I can’t be bothered to get all dressed up – if people can’t take me as I am, that’s their business. Not that I don’t/didn’t make an effort when I went out – I simply believe I’m attractive and charming enough for you to ignore the fact that I haven’t painted my toenails, or I just packed my hair up instead of having an intricate array of curls, or lord forbid, I’m wearing an outfit you’ve seen me in before. If it wasn’t making fun of how I looked it, it was abusing every single guy I liked as being ugly, boring, or not rich enough. It began to niggle when it came out that weeks after abusing said people, she’d start sleeping with them. There was this guy I was practically obsessed with for a while and she was constantly on his case about how un-good looking he was, how arrogant, what a player he was and how basically she couldn’t understand what I saw in him. Fair enough she had a point cos he was bad for me, but days after I’d finally moved on and hooked up with someone else, she slept with him. To make it worse he was the one who told me (and he wasn’t lying).


After a while I couldn’t take it anymore. Despite the fact that she had became one of those people that nobody liked – I was constantly defending our friendship to my other friends and my family who didn’t approve (apparently she was a bad influence), I tolerated it for soo long because I understood that she had issues and for all her agro, she had some redeeming qualities. However, when I start to feel that you’re constantly undermining me and it is beginning to sap my confidence, I realise I actually don’t need you in my life! I therefore started to withdraw and we stopped hanging out. The final straw came when I went to a party and didn’t tell her. She called me all angry and upset cos she had missed out and as “punishment”, she stopped talking to me. I mean how absurd! We got into a fight because I didn’t invite her to a party – and it wasn’t even like it was the party of the season!! I happily just used that as the end for me and never bothered trying to make it up to her. Months later, I’d run into her at parties – I’d smile and move on but we never spoke. I stopped doing Nigerian parties so I stopped seeing her but I’d bump into her every now and then. I don’t really hear much about her anymore – but it’s sometimes amusing to remember we were friends.