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friendships

Friendship, Guest Posts, healing, Inspiration, Women

Importance of Female Friendship

October 8, 2015

By Nicole Baxter

I never understood the importance of having female friends until eight months ago.   Before then I didn’t think it was that important.   In fact, for years I felt that having female friends just set you up for nothing but drama and heartache.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t say this just to say it; I say it out of experience.  When I was younger, I had trusted my best friend with a traumatic event only to have her betray that trust and ultimately cause a lot of pain.   Looking back even to this day, I cannot decide if it was that betrayal that caused me more pain or the actual event.   It was then I made the decision to never allow myself to get close to another girl and hence began the wall I erected.   I could be friends with females but to trust them was entirely a different thing.   I didn’t realize then when I made that promise to myself, how the importance of having close female friendship really is.

If you were to tell me a year ago that I would once again trust and allow another female friend into my heart, that I would reveal things to her that have occurred but never told anyone (let alone things I would not even admit to myself) I would have told you that you were crazy.  I am not even sure how it started other than it happened at a time that I needed it the most.   You know the saying: people come into your life for a reason.

At first it was only little things here and there but soon I began to trust her more and more.  All of a sudden I wanted to tell her everything even though it was hard and still today hard for me.   The more I shared the more I began to see what I had been missing out on the last 20 years.  I had closed myself off to others and now with her help, guidance and love I have begun to open my heart up and everyday it is opened a little more.   She has encouraged me to go after the dreams I put off, picks me up when I get down on myself (which is a lot lately), always telling me to be to myself, and that I am powerful and enough. Continue Reading…

Dear Life., Guest Posts, Relationships

Dear Life: I Am Afraid I Will Lose Everything.

January 3, 2015

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Welcome to Dear Life: An Unconventional Advice Column.

Your questions get sent to various authors from around the world to answer (and please keep sending because I have like 567 writers that want to answer your burning questions. Click here to submit a letter or email dearlife@jenniferpastiloff.com.) Different writers offer their input when it comes to navigating through life’s messiness. We are “making messy okay.” Today’s letter is answered by my dear friend Suzy Vitello, whose latest book, The Empress Chronicles,  just came out! Send us your questions because there loads of crazy authors waiting to answer ‘em. Just kidding, they aren’t crazy.

Well okay, maybe a little. Aren’t we all? xo, Jen Pastiloff, Crazy Beauty Hunter. ps, I will see you in Vancouver in a couple weeks! My first workshop there! 

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Dear Life,

My mom died when I was 6 and my dad raised us. He did a great- okay, he did the best job, he could. I realize this has colored so much of my life- this loss.

I am a mother now of my own and I cannot imagine my kids being raised without me. But this letter really isn’t about that. (Or, maybe it is?)

My husband and I have recently split up.

I am struggling with the separation but ultimately know it is for the best. We haven’t been happy in a long time. My career on the other hand, is going swimmingly. I have just published my second book and started my own business a few years ago, which has really taken off!

The reason I am writing to you is I have recently had a few people who I have let into my private inner circle “copy” me. I let very few people in as it is. I am extremely private.

I do realize I sound like a child when I say that people copy me.

People say, “You should feel flattered.” But I don’t. I worked so hard to create the things I have created. I feel sort of betrayed by these friends. I know that no one can be me (at least this is what people tell me) but I feel angry and sad that people do this.

I know that this happens in life, and that the more successful we become it will KEEP happening.

Why do I feel threatened? How do I get over caring? Does it matter? I feel consumed. Dealing with a separation and raising my kids and now feeling like I have to fiercely protect what is mine.

Do I just not let people in? Do I become more guarded?  (I have 2 books out in the world, so please keep this anonymous.)

I know that people imitate but I didn’t expect it to be friends.

I am worried that because I lost my mom I feel that things will always be taken away from me. I want to let this anger and fear go but I feel betrayed and frustrated and alone.

Signed,
Afraid

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Continue Reading…

Friendship, Jen Pastiloff, Jen's Musings

Hoarders.

February 11, 2014

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-blackBy Jen Pastiloff.

 

I’ve ben thinking about the stuff we hold onto, the stuff we hoard as humans- the lamps and the photographs and the people, and the little pieces of paper everywhere (me, specifically. I do this.) I found this jotted on a paper tonight: She doesn’t let me put my hands in the potato chip bag or anything- I have fake nails. My one extravagance. And I’m wondering who is she, and why I had fake nails, and what kind of potato chips and why is this piece of paper on my desk in between a Virginia Woolf library book I never returned from 1997 and a bottle of sleeping pills. Hoarder! I want to yell at myself but don’t because who listens when you yell at yourself? The you that is yelling hoarder or the you with her hand in the potato chip bag?

Let’s say I am the chick with her hand in the bag and let’s say they are salt and vinegars. Let’s say I have my hand in the bag and my fingers are kind of wet because maybe I’ve licked them to pick up crumbs and the crumbs are stuck to my fingers and I suck them off. (Let’s say that.) So I hear hoarder! being yelled but still, I eat the salt because it’s so good, addictive really, and there’s no way I can not not lick my fingers to get that goodness off of them. I want it all. The chip crumbs in the bag’s skin and every goddamn remnant of broken chip itself.

An old friend has had a birthday party recently and didn’t invite me. I found out and felt hurt. It dawns on me that we aren’t really friends anymore, not in the immediate sense anyway.

I think about the letter I got from one of the guys I work with. He’s trying to get/stay sober. I work with a bunch of recovering addicts who pretty regularly blow my mind. This guy gives me a letter, and one of the lines says, “I remember how many friends I have neglected as the years have passed.”

I think of this old friend who didn’t invite me to her party and I recall what a shitty friend I was to her during my shitty years. [1] And I wonder if this is payback or my karma, (if you believe in such a thing.) I’ve seen too many “bad” things happen without any retribution, at least not in this life, to really know if I believe in karma or not. But really, what it comes down to, I think, is hoarding. Knowing when to let go.

My grandmother, before she died, had this lampshade wrapped in plastic. For as long as I could remember, that lampshade was wrapped in plastic with the price tag dangling from it. It was never dusted, so although it may have originally been white or beige, it had long since become brown, and the price tag hanging from it reeked of despondency. Like she’d given up somewhere but couldn’t muster the strength to dust the lamp or at least to take the price tag off. And it wasn’t an expensive lamp, it was some cheap K-Mart thing, some hideous thing that had probably been on sale in 1987. She sat and did her crossword puzzles, oftentimes all day. Just sitting there, only stopping to open a can of salmon or to go to the door and blow smoke out. She offered me salmon salad once as an adult, and I was naïve enough to think she meant a salad with lettuce and maybe a piece of salmon on top.[2]

But back to the lamp. That fucking lamp made me want to scream. Take off the pricetag, Gram. Throw it out. It’s hideous.

She didn’t listen. She, in all honesty[3], couldn’t hear. She didn’t have hearing loss (I’m the lucky one with that trait) but rather she couldn’t take in anything anyone was saying. She’d ask a question and talk right over you. After a while you didn’t answer and you all just sat there while she did her puzzles and the price tag dangled. Her sofa had plastic on it too. Anyway, that just gives you an idea. It’s not a character bashing. I didn’t like my grandmother and most likely she didn’t like me so don’t feel too bad.

These ramblings are mine. Locked in my head or on page, they are mine. Hoarding them, you can say. Although my attempt at sending them out into the world is the opposite of that. Here, take them away from me.  Take the price tags and the time she threw a towel on me while I napped because she didn’t have a blanket. Take it all!

How do we know when to let go? Well, the signs are all around us, aren’t they? [4] Your friend doesn’t ever reach out, but rather you are always the one to reach out? Why do we hold on to these things?

I think on some level we think that by letting them go we will cease to endure- our potato chip fingers will evaporate into notes on our desks lodged in between books and pills and then what? We won’t have mattered- we will never be the impossible beautiful things we imagine ourselves to be. But if we hold on to it all, every last friendship and memory and price tag on a lamp, then we will have somehow survived what it means to be human and the fleeting moment we get. What’s that line from that Eminem song “Lose Youself”- You better never let it go. You only get one shot, do not miss your chance.

There’s a bit of truth in that.

Another guy I work with wrote: I remember my first girlfriend. Suzanne. She was Hispanic. She was beautiful. I wanted to sleep with her. We never did. I was in seventh grade.

I bet he holds on to that, that memory of Suzanne. Of course he does, he wrote it down all these years later and when he handed me the paper I could see there was a hesitation, like he was giving his Suzanne away. As if she would no longer be only his. In his imagination, in her seventh grade body and broken out face. He clutched the paper for a moment too long until I gave him the nod that said, “I won’t take her from you. You can keep her.”

They sustain us. Why else do we hold on to price tags on lamps and dead friendships? They trot us down the street when we feel like we have nothing. They pop up in our imagination and say, “Oh, but you do have something. You have this and this and this and this,” and even if you are completely deluding yourself- you haven’t talked to your friend in months or met her baby born last summer, you think, “this defines me, this keeps me in place.”

Well, I guess I’d like to call bullshit. Hoarder and bullshit! I’m calling it all. Why not? I’m  getting ballsier and less human and more human and all the things that aging does to us and I think about how pretending I loved my grandmother so people will think I am a good person is a façade. And holding on to every single thing that has carried me to this moment in time[5] is a like stealing. At a certain point, none of it is mine anymore.


[1] Shitty years: years between 21-31. Horrible self-deprecating, self-involved miserable years. Not a highlight in any friendship. Shitty years for friendships and for existence (mine.)

[2] but she meant a can of pink salmon, mashed with mayonnaise, split between three of us- her, my grandfather and myself. It was okay. Better than I expected.

[3] fact: she never once listened when she asked a question. This is not for sake of storytelling although it makes a good story. It is fact. I am hard of hearing but my grandmother never once heard a word I’ve said in the entire time I knew her.

[4] That’s a sign. Stop being ingnorant.

[5] Many things carried me here. Death, loss, joy, trauma, friendships, starvation, stupidity, creativity, balls, fear.

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