I am really sad today. A very good friend of mine needed to speak to me a couple of hours ago, because she really needed a friend. She had serious trouble with her boy-friend, again.
Her boy-friend is fifteen years older than her and comes from a very different cultural background. He's a Turk. I tried to warn her the first time she told me about him, that a man from that particular background is rarely able to accept women as equal. She promised me he wasn't that kind of guy.
Well, now she told me that he treated her for the second time like she was a pet that has to obey him at once. The sad thing about all that? She knows that he isn't good for her, but she thinks he gives her a feeling of security.
I tried to explain to her, that security is not given if your partner dictates what you can and cannot do. She just told me that she needs warmth and comfort, because she never gets it in her family and that she just hasn't got my self-confidence.
I cannot understand why she doesn't have any at all. She's really pretty, she models occassionally. She's very intelligent, too, she studies air and space technics(...I don't know the correct word in English, sorry). She is one of the warmest, kindest people I've ever met, a true and loyal friend. And she doesn't even have a spark of self-confidence.
I told her to take confidence in her character, in those traits that make her a truely good person. I told her, that if she cannot believe in herself, she should at least believe that her friends wouldn't be friends with her if she weren't a good person.
But she cannot do that. She thinks she doesn't have the strength. I told her that, yes, she does have that strength, the only problem is that she thinks she doesn't.
I am at my wits end. We are living in different towns, because of our studies, and in a couple of weeks she will go to another country to work there. I cannot give her the immediate reassurance she needs any longer(...that's what I did back when we were in the same school). She doesn't even try to do any of the things I advise her to do. What else could I do to help her?
Sometimes I even get angry at her when she tells me she doesn't have my inner strength, that she cannot not care what people might think about her.
I didn't get that kind of self-confidence by doing nothing. When I got into my teens, I became very introverted, even more than I'd already been as a kid. Back then I started to look into my soul and dissected every piece of my self, studied it, measured it at my ideals, at what I thought a good person should be, and jugded it.
I do that every single day since my thirteenth birthday. It isn't easy and it isn't always comfortable. Sometimes it even makes me hate and despise myself as a coward, if I didn't help people I could have helped, if I didn't say anything when someone should have spoken. But that is where you can find self-confidence.
I can look into the mirror and honestly say I am proud to be as I am. I could be better, of course, but I can live with what I see.
And then she talks about my self-confidence as if it fell into my lap someday and decided to stay.
She thinks that because I am not constantly looking for a partner, I do not feel the same longing for security, comfort and warmth.
The person that gave me those things, even though he wasn't my boy-friend, died four years ago in a car accident. I never told him how very important he was for me and I am regretting it every single day since then.
I've never been actively searching for those things, because I believe that someday, if it is your destiny, you will meet that one person that belongs to you and whom you belong to, too.
I already met and lost that one person. That doesn't mean I don't understand her. It just means that I recognized that you cannot take strength from others. If you want warmth you will have to create it yourself. If you want to to feel safe, to be strong, you will have to find those things in yourself.
I don't know how to help her any longer and that makes me sad, because it means that I aren't meeting my own expectations. I hate it when I aren't able to help a friend because she doesn't accept it even though she asks for it.
Current Mood: 
sad
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