I must say, Lucinda, given the nature of your column, I was expecting advice on whether I should remain friends with these girls, and if so, how to go about letting go of my anger and mistrust to rebuild my bond with them. I wrote seeking advice from an unbiased third party.
I was not expecting to be mocked or accused of being a liar, as you did to me in the column ” My Friends Ditched Me When I Got Drugged .”
For the record, I really was roofied, ma’am. The idea that I must provide you with a tox screen to prove it is galling.
I was in tears AGAIN after reading your “advice.” For a few brief seconds, I felt the hopelessness, fear and anxiety I felt that day and the weeks after, and I am disappointed in myself that I allowed your comments to have an effect on me and my mood. But I agree especially with one commentor who said that telling the victim of a drugging that she might have just made some poor decisions is like telling a rape victim she really just regrets having sex with an unattractive person.
I am lucky that I don’t remember any part of the night, and was perhaps wrong to attempt to piece it together from anecdotes from my friends; it did make me appear as though my story had holes. It does, in fact, have one BIG hole-from the time the band started their second set until the time I woke up alone in the hospital. Perhaps my writing, your editing, or a combination of the two failed to make that point. But I expected more from you in the way of helping me deal with my friendship with these women, not my own allegedly off-kilter expectations. If you wanted to know whether I have a history of getting drunk and wandering off (I don’t), or even just getting wasted-drunk (again, I don’t), could you not have e-mailed me?
And, as it turns out, there was one big piece of the puzzle missing that fell into place later-the explaination for why my friends were angry the next morning. While I was drugged, my friends tell me I ended up dancing with a boy my friend has a crush on. She thought I had violated the sacred bonds of friendship by dancing with (not kissing, not sleeping with) a guy she had told me she was attracted to. (I have no memory of dancing with him, and never would have if I had been aware of myself at all.) So even though she told me she thought something was wrong-I am rarely, if ever, wasted or stupid-drunk-she and the others left me at the concert, fed up with my flirty behavior.
But in the end, I don’t need your advice after all-I figured it out all by myself. Ten years of friendship is a long time, but I was clinging to an institution and a bond that these women abandoned years ago. Perhaps we continued to see each other socially because it was easier than forging new bonds. I’m not sure. For now, these women might be in my social circle due to our vast network of mutual friends, but they are certainly not the close confidantes I once thought I had.
P.S. The day I rely more on a boyfriend than on a best girlfriend is the day I lose hope for womankind.
