One-sided

I once had a friend criticize me for sustaining a friendship that was pretty one-sided. In fact, many friends have criticized this in me. I was thinking today about that criticism and whether or not I thought it was true. In particular I thought about the way it works in my female friendships.

This is what usually happens:

After much work, I end up getting together with a girl friend I haven't talked to in a while. We chat about her relationship with whatever boy, how it's developing, how it's not developing, how excited she is about it, how awesome it is that things are going so well, etc. Occasionally she expresses doubts about the current situation, and I offer advice.

I guess the conversation doesn't feel one-sided because I am doing a lot of talking. Granted, this talking is usually in abstractions or talking about her and her relationship/male interest, etc. I prefer to keep the conversation away from myself for as long as possible. I ask for it.

Eventually she, like most people who talk to me for any length of time, feels guilty for talking about herself for 90% of the time and decides to offer the last 5 minutes of our time before she is scheduled to be somewhere, meet someone, etc. as a question to me, "How are you?" I say, "Fine. I'm doing well." Acceptable answer. Crisis averted, and then there is the inevitable, "How's nursing school?"

I've found that I have been easily reduced to my identity as a nursing student. Granted, I enjoy helping people but sometimes I feel the only way people know to communicate with me now is to ask some medical question so I may indulge them in an answer. It goes a little something like this, "I have this rash; what do you think is going on?" (and I was wrong) or "I have this mass in my neck; it's really hard, and it hurts. What is it?" I do enjoy a little medical mystery every now and then, and I am flattered that my friends trust me so much to inquire about their medical woes, but I also feel overwhelmingly that I have lost a lot of my personhood by going to a professional school. "How are you?" has been replaced with, "How is nursing school?"

I am not sure that I feel altogether prepared to answer the former. I mean, I'm fine.