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the commodification of friendship is the most annoying thing to come out of the internet in ages. like actually i love to break this to you but you’re supposed to help your friends move even if it’s hard work. or stay up with them when they’re sad even if you’re gonna lose sleep. you’re supposed to listen to their fears and sorrows even if it means your own mind takes on a little bit of that weight. that’s how you know that you care. they will drive you to the airport and then you will make them soup when they’re sick. you’re supposed to make small sacrifices for them and they are supposed to do that for you. and there’s actually gonna be rough patches for both of you where the balance will be uneven and you will still be friends and it will not be unhealthy and they will not be abusive. life is not meant to be an endless prioritization of our own comfort if it was we would literally never get anywhere ever. jesus.
okay so I love the general sentiment of this post but it’s missing how this was a genuinely good and necessary idea that spiraled out of control in the hands of people who never got therapy. i was on tumblr a decade ago when this belief was popularized — here, not on twitter. it was originally because we were all severely mentally ill middle and high schoolers trying to be the only adult in the lives of fellow middle and high schoolers, and sometimes even grown adults. we were all destroying ourselves for as many people as possible because we believed that if we didn’t step up and save people, most of them wouldn’t have anyone else to do it.
telling each other we didn’t have to be the therapist for everyone else was revolutionary for a lot of us, actually. it saved a lot of mental anguish and heartache for loads of us. of course, it got twisted over time, because that’s the nature of social media in general. not just twitter! an idea is repeated and added onto like an endless toxic game of telephone until no one remembers where it started and why. losing sleep for a sad friend wasn’t a small sacrifice most of the time — it was what we were expected to do to keep our friends, fellow teenagers, from killing themselves in the night. because if we didn’t, it was our fault.
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