Annie Fox for Teens... Hey, Terra!

Annie (AKA Hey Terra!) has been around long enough to have experienced a lot of what Life can dish out. But, it hasn’t been so long that she's forgotten what it's like to be your age. Check out some of the thousands of email questions teens from around the world have sent to Terra. You may learn something useful from her answers:

Jealousy:
“I'm not sure I want to be me in this friendship any more.”

Hey Terra,

My best friend can get easily jealous. If I'm with her and a bunch of other friends, and I don't talk to her, she'll get really sad because I'm not talking to her. But when she ignores me for her other friends I don't complain to everyone about how I'm ignored like her. It bothers me but I don't tell anyone that it does. Do you think that this friendship is worth staying in?

Teddy Bear

Dear Teddy Bear,

Before you decide whether to end your friendship, how about telling your best friend what you told me? Shouldn't you have honesty in a friendship? Shouldn't you be able to say: "I really care about our friendship and I want to make it stronger. I want to work on problems when they come up so that bad feelings don't get so big they make us not want to spend time together. It makes me feel smothered (or whatever) when we're with a bunch of people and you seem upset when I talk to them and not just to you. I'd like to talk about that."

Then see what she says. And please don't say that you can't tell her the truth because it will "hurt her feelings." (I hear that a lot.) If it's your intention to make the friendship stronger, then "clearing the air" is very important. If you keep quiet about this you're going to end up losing your best friend.

In friendship,

Terra


Need some advice? Write to Terra. She'll give you a straight answer you can trust without any lectures.


What's New?
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