She dropped the ball, I'm furious.

[Missiechan]

 

 

I posted on this site a while back about a friend I was having trouble with and since then, things have gotten worse in a way I never expected them to.

 

My friendship with Elle started three years ago and we were never meant to be friends. We were meant to have a working relationship. I am a writer and it's my dream to create beautiful comics for girls and that's how we met. I was working for an independent comic company and Elle joined as an artist. We were put together for a project and we got along very well. That was mainly down to me though; I'm a very bubbly person and Elle was so shy and withdrawn, I made a real effort to befriend her. She only had one other friend and I guess I felt sorry for her.

 

Our work together went well, and we decided to leave the company (the owner was treating us very badly) after we came runner-up in a international comic competition. Reviews of our first work named us as a favourite and we got to work on a new project to be published with the company that ran the competition. That's when things started to go wrong.

 

I made a huge effort to put a pitch together. I wrote all the scripts, plotlines, summaries, character summaries, cover pages and everything else we were asked for and I did it fast. I also put the speech bubbles on the finished work. That is, when I got finished work, which was almost never. Elle dragged her feet on the project big time. She drew rough layouts that were too detailed to be rough work, wasn't happy with them and drew them again. She started the proper work and worked at a rate of one page a week. I let this go because she was in college and she had a lot of work to do (unlike me with my full-time job, sorry for the sarcasm.) Then she finished college and deferred her course for a year to work on the project, but she didn't work on the project. She kept going back to college to do work on projects she had there that didn't need doing. When she was finished there, she went looking for a part-time job to earn some money (she got one and was fired three weeks later.) I dragged myself to her house for a few days to see her work in progress and found out that she wouldn't sit still to do the work for more than a few minutes, and while I was sitting on her couch with my laptop lettering the little work she had finished, she badgered me to get up and do something else!

 

To add to all this, she is a very popular artist on link removed. She makes fan comics that people can view for free, and I know she did a lot of these when she could have been working on our project. She has no job, she has no college and she lives at home.

 

The last straw came on Monday. We got a letter from our publisher to tell us the submission guidelines have changed and we now have to wait almost a year to be published, if we get published at all. If she had finished the work a month ago, we would be published right now. She had the time, the talent and nothing to distract her. So why the hell didn't she do it?

 

I feel sick because she's not just ruining her own promising career, she's taking mine down with her. She was talking to me about going back to college to become an art teacher like she's given up! I'm so angry and upset I can't even answer the phone when she rings. Am I justified in feeling this way? I've done so much for her and this is how she repays me. I just want to curl up in a corner and cry.

 

Sorry about the long post.

 

Missiechan

[elite867]

Missiechan,

 

I think that you are justified in your anger towards Elle - that is in her role as a co-worker. I know you are friends, but in your professional role you are co-workers.

 

I recently read Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle and he said that friendships are often created because they are either useful or pleasurable. Basically, you are friends because you want something from the other person. He then said that this is not true friendship -- true friends are friends when they are neither useful nor pleasurable.

 

Elle is not useful because she is not getting the job done and possibly not pleasurable based on some of your comments regarding her. However, if these things are the basis of your friendship, I would advise cutting your losses and find someone who can get the job done.

 

If you genuinely care about her, then be her friend. If you can't work with her, then tell her gently that you can't and find someone else to work with.

 

I hope this helped at least a little....