HOW FAKE FRIENDS CAN TEACH YOU A LESSON WHEN THEY KILL YOUR PASSIONS

Some of you, if not most or even all of you, might assume that I’m a baby to blogging as I only started this website in November 2021. I’m actually not, though. I started 10 years ago. It was a time when blogging wasn’t even a thing yet. My log was called HR+(Blog). I wrote about such topics as Human Resources, Business, Marketing and Project Management. I didn’t just write about these topics. I connected each topic with anything that has to do with entertainment, such as actors, musicians, public figures, movies and TV shows. I still do this on this blog, but I connect anything relating to entertainment with mental health topics. You can check out the entertainment category to check out all of my entertainment related content.

I started the blog while I was in college. It was never my intention to make any money off of the blog. I started it strictly because I had a passion for writing, and I wanted to expand my horizons. But to my surprise, HR+(Blog) grew very quickly. I had thousand of viewers and readers, and even celebrities took notice of my public persona. It wasn’t a persona, though. It was the real me typing my real thoughts and opinions behind my computer.

I was very proud of the work I’d done with the blog. I was proud of what I got to achieve with the blog in the short amount of time thatI ran the blog all by myself. Thanks to it, I even got to write on behalf of a recruitment agency where I wrote anything and everything relating to Human Resources, specifically recruitment – hiring, firing, interviewing process, the pre-screening process, and more.

I achieved a lot more with the blog than I ever expected, especially considering the fact that I was just a 20 year old woman at the time. People – both men and women – that noticed me through social media or by Google search were taking me seriously despite my age and me being a college student. I felt like I was on top of the world. I was inspired by what I was doing. I felt seen. So many people read and got invested in the blog that I almost felt like a celebrity myself.

It was nice to be seen and head by an online community. People who I never even met in my life were so supportive of me. I wish I could say that my inner circle was just as supportive, if not more. But that was farther from the truth. A lot of my friends were very supportive of my newfound part-time profession as a blogger. But as we all know, people change, friendships change, and therefore, friends come and go.

It was 3 years by 2015 that I started my blog. By that point, I didn’t need to even think of doing much promotion to get my website seen. Others were doing all the work for me by sharing the content they were interested in on their own socials. Also in 2015, I became friends with a new group of people. My husband was friends with someone, let’s call that person D, from the group for years, but they were never close. All of a sudden, in November 2014, my husband gets a phone call from D asking if we were free to come over to his new house. All of a sudden, we had a newfound close friendships. D introduced us all of his friends, who were about 4-5 years older than I was, which at the time was a very big age gap. My husband and I were spending each weekend, sometimes even twice a weekend, partying with D and his friends from that moment on.

In early 2015, D started dating someone that I eventually became close friends with. Let’s call her Z. After some time of being friends with D and his group of friends, there became a shift in our relationship. Slowly but surely, I became a target for them to laugh at my expense as much as they possibly could. They were older and had ‘real jobs’. I was younger, a college student, and had some dumb little blog that no one was interested in in the first place. The only person that wasn’t making fun of me, and instead respected me on every level was Z. D was a good friend to my husband, and as years went by, I became closer and closer to Z. D, especially, wasn’t just laughing at my expense for my work. He took every opportunity he ever could to laugh at me. These included laughing at my expense for living with my parents, laughing at and making joke on my relationship with my husband, laughing at my expense for my past relationships that were abusive, and even poking fun at my health. That type of behaviour became the norm, and I accepted that behaviour because I was putting others first before myself.

In November 2015, I closed down HR+(Blog). It wasn’t because I really anted to shut it down. It was more of the scrutiny that I was experiencing from people who I thought were my friends. Let’s face the real facts here. These people were never my friends in the first place. Friends don’t treat their friends that way. I wanted to fit to my friends’ definition of what they defined to be the real world. After I shut down the blog, I started my career path as a freelance writer. Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely loved what I did as a freelance writer. I got to learn so much through each and every client I worked with and each and every project I worked on, no matter how big or small that project was. But it wasn’t my passion. After about 6 years of working as a professional freelance writer, I grew so tired of it. It was especially true once the pandemic hit a worldwide high. A year into the pandemic, I many of my projects that I had coming up were cancelled and people just didn’t have enough money to outsource a professional writer with my level of experience.

In some way, my freelancing business slowing down and eventually being completely cancelled was a blessing. This failure that was out of my control was exactly how this blog, The Graceful Boon, was born. I could’ve done so much more if I didn’t listen to my fake friends and went with my gut instead. But that’s the past and there’s nothing I can do to change it. I live life with no regrets. I learn and grow from my mistakes. I’m choosing to focus on what I’m doing now and what the future holds for me and the blog.

My fake friends were the biggest blessings, I’d say. They killed my passion of writing. They killed my willingness to do something different just because it wasn’t up to their standards. In the end, though, they made me stronger. They taught me not to care what other people think of me or what I do. They taught me to be true to myself even if others don’t like it. I can’t please everyone, and I think that that’s okay. What matters most is that no matter what I do, I do it for myself; not for others and certainly not to please other people.