Ay yi yi. I never thought I’d see the day when I was referred to as “the sane one.” This despite the fact that my so-called friends are making me NUTS! I have had to leave out a LOT of details, because to include all of them would make this post approximately the length of War and Peace–it’s loooong as it is, please bear with me.
I have these two friends, let’s call them “Jane” and “Betty.” I’ve known Jane for 2-1/2 years now; she and I transferred to this school the same year and live in the same house (my college doesn’t have traditional dorms but smaller houses with between 10-70 residents; my house has 11). Jane and I have been through a lot together and we have become good friends. Now, Jane has, to put it gently, a screw or two loose. She’s my best friend, but she’s a bit of a wacko. She has other friends, but I’m really the only one who can put up with her consistently, and I think I’m the only one she really opens up to. Betty arrived last year and also lives in the same house as Jane and me. Jane and Betty are from the same neck of the woods and are very similar in temperament, and the three of us became pretty good friends last year.
This year, Betty got a bug up her ass for reasons still unknown to the rest of us and decided she didn’t like Jane any more. The two of them have been fighting for, oh, about 6 weeks. I told Jane that I will not choose between my friends and that I refused to get in the middle, that they needed to sort out whatever it was between the two of them. Betty went though a period of apparently being pissed off at the entire world and basically antagonized everyone else in the house, thus expanding the conflict beyond her and Jane.
A few days ago, Jane and Betty were scheduled for a meeting with a college staff member to try to resolve the problems between them. Jane called me up, almost hysterical, saying if I didn’t see her again, she’d leave me a note telling me what to do with her stuff. After a minute or two, I discovered the meeting hadn’t even happened yet, so I spent almost an hour talking her down off the emotional ledge, trying to get her to not decide how it was going to be before it happened. At the meeting, Betty didn’t show, Jane had a meltdown because she felt she was being unfairly singled out (remember Betty was annoying everyone else too), plus some lingering childhood trauma that this incident apparently triggered, and ended up spending the night in the infirmary.
Today, “Mary,” our house president/head resident, came to me in tears because Jane wrote her a rather nasty letter blaming her for all the trouble. Apparently, Jane expected Mary to intervene with Betty on her behalf because she was unable (read:unwilling) to confront Betty herself. Now Mary is ready to quit and move to another house because she’s fed up with getting stuck in the middle of other people’s problems; she’s only unofficially our head resident because nobody else wanted the job because this house is full of CRAZY PEOPLE! I, being the only person left she can talk to, have now become her personal wailing wall as well. I tried to stay out of the middle of Jane vs Betty, now I’m stuck in the middle of Jane vs Mary!
[sub]Help me.[/sub]