Lesson about friends

Apparently, a friend is a single soul living in two bodies.

That's kind of creepy. But I get the thought behind it, it's talking about the commonality that exists between friends and how that essentially makes them one 'being'.

Off late, it's been easier and easier to say that, "He's a friend, she's a friend and so are all of them" the term 'friend' has no built-in hierarchy, so a friend is a friend. No medium has highlighted this more than facebook where you can have thousands of 'friends' (Personally I have 590 friends or some ridiculous number) while they're marked as friends, I cannot help that I am betraying the people that are actually my friends. After all, those people have earned the tag of a friend. A majority of those facebook people? Not so much.

What am I getting at?

Good question.

What I'm trying to say is that sometimes a person who you feel is a friend, is actually, not your friend.

Genius, am I right?

In October of 2013, I became the President of my college's student council. Yay, good for me, blah, blah, blah. I never celebrated, because I knew that I had entered a realm that was extremely treacherous and dangerous.

Over the last few months, I've had to make some tough calls. I've had people who have aggressively come at me for certain decisions, or for the things that I represent. I've had to battle them; friends, acquaintances, teachers, etc, I've taken it all in my stride.

I am personally, proud of myself that I have learned the ability to emotionally distance myself from a professional problem. I have had rather head on encounters with several people, however after learning this thing, this ability to not fight, but to discuss, I have really ended up benefiting from it.

In December, I had a sit down with a person who had raised several issues about a number of things, emotions were high and I needed address it. I had had what I would only describe as Cuban Missile Crisis Game Theory encounters with this person, so needless to say, I was sufficiently concerned as to how it might go. When the meeting got over, and in the months that followed, I realized that while we might not agree with certain professional aspects, or even personal aspects, we had enough intelligence and a level of respect and understanding between each other to say that we would make efforts to ensure that this doesn't happen.

In January, I had an incident with a friend, it was a professional one and it soured my personal relation with him, but I was happy to note that as soon as the matter was over, we were able to resume like there was never any problem. I took that as a sign that there was a strong friendship that existed.

What does one do, when an extremely close friend, refuses to understand the boundaries of friendship and professionalism? This isn't about ego, or positions. It's about a person calling me out on the level of friendship and then questioning me about my professional actions.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's unacceptable, because that's taking advantage of my friendship to share your personal feelings about a work decision.

Don't get me wrong, I encourage and urge people to comment and correct me when I have done something wrong. But this is generally at an open level which is still maintained as a professional discussion. This means that I can still meet the person later and not feel that we're going to have the same discussion again. But this...

I don't know what to do about this, my personal logic tells me that systems and boundaries have been breached and something must be done. 'If you stand for nothing, you'll bend for anything' isn't that the saying?