Do you have A Best Friend in the place that you live? I don’t; I have acquaintances and former work friends and mom friends, but no one who’s really… a Best Friend. I mean, I have my spouse! He’s certainly my best friend and my soul mate, but let’s not get all ooey gooey about him. I’m talking about a non-romantic bestie, someone to go grab a glass of wine with, someone who will go shopping with you and tell you which jeans look best, someone who knows and loves you for who you are, someone who will dissect every facet of an awkward interaction ad nauseum, perhaps while watching The Good Place.
I do have close friends. They just… don’t live nearby.
Some days I am totally fine with the fact that I don’t have a best friend right here in town with me; other days I feel crushing woe. This is a crushing woe period, and I think the root of the current woe is a communication desert between me and these friends. Take my lifelong best friend, for instance. She lives in our hometown, where we met more than 25 years ago. She and I have maintained our relationship via the magic of phone calls since we left for college in fall of 1999. Sometimes we talk every day. Sometimes we go a few weeks without talking – especially in the past few years. But I’d say on average we talk about once a week. And right now, we’re in a period of very infrequent contact. It sucks.
Same goes for… pretty much everyone else on my Regular Contact list. For some reason, there’s a lull in communication with everyone. And it’s freaking me out. I miss these people! I miss knowing what’s going on in their lives. And I miss talking to someone who knows me really well; it’s really hard, for me at least, to get to the point in a friendship where you feel fully relaxed and comfortable around the other person. I just don’t have that kind of relationship with any of the mom friends I’ve made.
I am 95% sure – based on past experience – that the communication desert has nothing to do with me. The most likely explanation for the radio silence is that my friends are just really busy, and keeping up with me isn’t top of the priority list at this moment. If I think about that too hard, it makes me sad, but I do understand it.
Since I believe that my friends are just busy, I do try to stay in touch anyway, despite a lack of response. But that can be tiring. And disheartening; I end up wondering if I’m being annoying, or if I’m pushing on boundaries my friend is trying to set, or if I’m not getting the hint.
Because even though I know the likely explanation is that they are just busy, it’s hard not to worry. Did I offend them somehow? Is something really upsetting going on in their lives that they can’t tell me about? Worst of all, are we drifting apart? Are they ghosting me? Is this the end of our friendship? Am I unlikable and destined to go through life friendless and alone?
Okay, okay, let’s rein it in here. I am feeling lonely and adrift and the gloom of ceaseless rain seems like it’s here to stay but dwelling on it certainly isn’t helping, so I am going to change the subject.
Have you ever bitten your nails? Carla does, and it’s to the point that I cannot look at her fingers without every molecule of my body cringing. I worry she’s permanently disfiguring her fingers. Or that it’s just a matter of time before she gets some horrific bacterial infection and goes into septic shock or loses her hands. I haven’t heard a lot of stories about nail-biting-related amputations (and nor do I want to, thank you!!!!) (must… resist… googling…) but my mind always goes to the worst possible outcome.
I talked to her pediatrician, and he was pretty blasé about it; he recommended touching her hand gently every time I notice it. That was it. That’s all well and good if she bites her nails while I’m sitting next to her, or if she’s sitting on my lap while I’m reading to her. But what if she’s in the next room? What if she’s in the back seat of the car? What if she’s at school? The “knock it off, Carla!” and “stop biting your nails, Carla!” yelled across the room/car method is not a good deterrent, that’s for sure.
We tried putting special tape on each of her fingers, creating a physical barrier between her teeth and her nails. The tape stayed on for approximately three minutes and then came off.
We suggested bandaids instead, but Carla has a severe phobia of bandaids (I’m not kidding), and just trying to convince her to let us put one on a single one of her fingers was traumatic enough that we gave up.
We bought some of that nail biting polish that tastes horrible, and tried that. It did not work. She still bites her nails.
We tried bribing her with pretty nail polish and with those cute nail stickers — the ones that have unicorns, mermaids, flowers, or animal faces that you can stick directly on your fingernails. But her nails are so bitten that the stickers don’t fit on them, and so far the bribe hasn’t been enticing enough to keep her from biting.
So now I am trying the Ignoring It method.
My husband used to bite his nails, until quite recently. He finally just quit cold turkey. I have no idea how. My mother and father-in-law both used to bite their nails, and they managed to quit. So there’s hope.
And I used to bite mine – still do, if I’m being honest. At some point in high school or college, I stopped biting them compulsively. But anytime they get so long that they peel or crack, I bite them. And I cannot wear nail polish because the instant it chips, I peel it off with my teeth (I know, GROSS and probably poisonous) (In my youth, I used to wear Sally Hansen Hard As Nails clear nail polish just so I could peel it off with my teeth. Kids are weird, man.) and then bite my nails. Sigh.
So maybe it’s genetic. And maybe she will eventually get over it (like her father and grandparents have) or learn to manage it (like I have). But sheesh. It is so awful.
Well, at least she doesn’t bite her toenails. I suppose I should be thankful for THAT.
I think of the “best friend” concept as existing in childhood but not in adulthood—or rather, not in my adulthood, since I assume some adults do have best friends. I have a lot of nice friends of various levels of closeness, and I like that I have some who are email friends, some who are old childhood friends, some who are in-person friends, some who are group-friends (like, I only see them in that group) and some who are group-and-not-group friends (I see them in the group but also on their own), and so on. Plus of course I have Twitter/blog friends.
I didn’t bite my nails but, worse, I bit the skin around the nails. Grosser, I’d argue. At some point in adulthood I just realized I’d stopped. I still ONCE IN AWHILE do bite a little, but hardly at all now.
Rob bit his nails pretty badly as a child and nothing we tried made him stop. He does it a lot less now.
I bit my nails as a child. I don’t anymore. I finally somehow convinced myself that if I kept them painted they’d be too pretty to bite. I also convinced myself that the polish was poison; I don’t think it is but still who wants to ingest paint?
I have noticed that if I don’t keep them painted now though, I will pick at them relentlessly.
I do have a very close friend that lives two doors down. So, you’d think we would see each other and talk all the time. We don’t. We are in different “seasons” of our lives. She currently has small children and I don’t. We sync up when we can.
I live far away from my best friend, too. I have weekly goals to check in with four VIPs in my life, including my BFF. That includes just texting. That way everyone I don’t see daily who is super meaningful in my life knows I think about them at least once a week. I also send mail to my grandmother and a couple of elderly relatives once a month. I track this on a paper calendar, too, to hold myself accountable.
I used to bite my nails as a child. Then I switched my oral habit to gum chewing, which is, if I’m honest, a lot worse. I don’t bite my nails now, although I’ll go at a hangnail if it’s bothering me, but I chew gum all day long and it’s a disgusting, disgusting habit.
I miss having best friends – I have mom friends, who are great – but not the same as a BFF. My lame sisters are each other’s BFF. Coach is for sure my best friend, but I totally get the wish to have a non-romantic BFF. When we pulled the kids out of Catholic school we had to start over as far as ‘couple’ friends go and even some mom friends. That has put a real damper on our social lives. At the new school, most of the kids’ parents already had their ‘group’ of friends. People are nice, but we aren’t part of their ‘original’ group.
I have a few longtime, close friends from childhood. Neither of them ever married or had kids, so we aren’t in the same boat currently. One of them doesn’t live far, but we don’t see each other that often.
The other childhood friend lives in Baltimore (me= Chicago). She has been my best friend since high school. She totally gets me. She stopped responding to my text messages or answering my calls a little over a year ago. That sucks. I think leading very different lives wore on her. She would start to say things like ‘1st world problems’ to me. I realize now that I called her a lot when things were running a muck and I wanted her to be sarcastic and snarky with me. I also suspect that she was tired of hearing about my family drama – as in middle child, the family-that-raised-me drama. She was one of the few people who knew my history and understood it. She couldn’t stand my family and hated how they treated me. I think she got sick of me struggling with it and not just completely severing ties with them. I was definitely using her to vent about the stuff that I felt powerless to put an end to. Like I said, it sucks.
Never chewed my nails. I had serious iron deficiencies when my celiac disease was not diagnosed. Supposedly iron deficiency leads to a need to chew. I don’t chew gum, but can I tell you how much I miss chomping on Oat Squares cereal? Definitely more caloric than nail biting.
I was just like Carla! I bit my nails painfully until I was about 23, and nothing stopped me. Not bribes, not bad tasting nail stuff, nothing. I stopped on my own when I was working and I wanted to look professional. To this day I keep my nails polished so that it reminds me not to bite them. I also have the habit of peeling polish so I’m careful about the kind I buy.