Do you watch Grey’s Anatomy? If you do, you’ll know exactly what I’m referring to. If not, please bear with me, I’ll make my point in a second.
I haven’t been watching much TV lately. When I’m feeling lonely or sorry for myself, I tend to avoid real people and instead spend some time as a TV-addicted hermit. (And yes, I do realize that sounds pathetic – bite me .)
I’ve been so busy organizing book swaps and contacting local boutique owners and looking into the Zurich event calendar and reading books the Book Bitch helped me select and doing anything else I could think of to create a life for me here that would keep me happy and satisfied and full-immersion into the good place and away from the bad place, that I haven’t gotten my usual dose of ABC junk (ok, maybe just light-weight) TV.
So I started watching last week’s episode, and I found myself watching Christina debate whether she’d choose love or surgery if she was faced with that kind of choice. And Meredith tells her something like: “Listen to me. This is NOT the kind of thing you talk about. It’s like telling someone their baby is ugly: the mom knows it, you know it, but it’s not the kind of thing you say out loud. Christina, this love-or-surgery thing – I get it, and you can talk about it with me – but this isn’t the thing you can talk about with people.” and then Hunt calling Christina and Meredith “The Twisted Sisters”. Why am I even talking about this? It’s a TV series, for goodness’ sake. It’s just so random and completely irrelevant to real life, ins’t it?
This is all fiction, sure. But it’s not random. And it’s not irrelevant when you know exactly what it’s like.
What it’s like to have a friend you can share the best things with, but also the worst things.
Someone who likes you for your good traits, but also fro your bad ones.
Someone who doesn’t just tolerate it when you are obnoxious, but who can and will be obnoxious right along with you. Not to hurt other people, never to be mean to others. But we all have good and bad in us, light and dark. And no matter how much we try to be good, and how successful we might be at it, sometimes the dark peeks through. The insane, the neurotic, the lazy, the bratty part of you.
And I know what it’s like to be one half of your very own Twisted Sisters.
It’s refreshing, to be able to be that honest and open with someone.
It’s freeing, not to ever have to put on a facade, not even when you are at your worst, so far off from your usual self that you avoid others to avoid having to fake being normal.
It’s also fun sometimes, when you feel less than virtuous, less than efficient, and so far from perfect that it’s nothing but an impossibly tiny dot to you – it can be fun to have someone who feels like that to, who gets it, who can crack jokes about it, and all of a sudden the bad stuff is all a laughing matter.
And yet sometimes that relationship can turn on you. Because that unspoken rule about being always yourself with that person can be a double-edged sword. And the relationship can reach a point where you get so stuck accepting the quirks and bad moods and negative, that you no longer motivate each other to snap out of it. And you need to do that.
Because if a friend tells you to snap out of it is not with judgment, it’s not with dislike.
You need to do that, because if a friend can’t do that, then who else can?
You need to do that because it’s your duty as a friend.
And you, the other side, need to accept it and not take it as an attack. Because if a friend goes as far as saying something like that to you, telling you to snap out if it (even if they use different words), then it really needs to be said.
I’ve been on both ends. And I can tell you, if you value your friendship, and the other half of your Twisted Sisters duo, you need to be able to call your friend out on their crap. And you need to be able to take, it too. And then you can keep being obnoxious and inspiring and fun and supportive and neurotic together.
And if you don’t know what I’m talking about… may you also find your own twisted sister 
