Please, do explain how exactly I make your life difficult.

I thought friends were supposed to be there for each other. You know, as a support system or whatever. I thought that if things got really bad, I could rely on the three friends I've considered my closest for the past three years of high school. After all, people always say that when you need help and feel hopeless, you should always go to your friends. They will pick you up and make you feel like you're not alone; they'll be there for you always.

Apparently I was wrong; that's not what friends are for.

Maybe I should explain the reason for this journal. For the past few years, my family has gone through a bit of sh*t. First, my mom lost her job about six years ago, then turned to alcohol to cope. She's now a heavy alcoholic, and I have no idea how to help her. On top of that, she developed stage four breast cancer, and somehow, even though she was hammered for most of the two years she had chemotherapy, radiation, and surgeries, she survived. Don't get me wrong. I love my mother, but she's so lucky she survived because she is the worst alcoholic I have ever heard of.

There are times when she is drunk for months on end. She'll get up out of bed at two a.m., go down into the basement, and pull out a bottle or two of wine and drink them until the sun rises. Then she'll go back to bed and a few hours later do it all over again. Sometimes she passes out on the floor or on the couch, and when I find her, I have to carry her back upstairs. It's a struggle because she's a big woman and I'm not very strong, but she's my mom, and I can't just bring myself to leave her there. Some days it will be four o'clock in the afternoon, and she'll stumble about, asking why my sister and I aren't in bed because it's one in the morning. Later those nights, I'll wake up at midnight and find her in the kitchen, trying to make dinner. Then I have to carry her upstairs again after cleaning up the counter.

My parents fight a lot about the alcoholism. My dad tries so hard to help her, but she's not responsive when she's drunk. She's sober for at most maybe a month each year. If she gets provoked enough in the fights, she gets angry and violent and will start throwing things and swearing. It's the worst on holidays when my grandmother comes over; last Christmas, the fight lasted for over two hours, and I had to grab as many sharp things off the counter because I thought my mom was going to use them to hurt my father.

When my mom isn't drunk, she and my dad are fighting with my brother, who pretty much runs the family business and thinks he's the reason the world turns because of it. Every day I have to hear each side of the fighting and numbly nod along because I can't just say what I really feel. I am my family's rock; they expect me to agree with them and smooth things over when I can't.

To wrap this background up, I am never away from this sh*t. My life goes from getting yelled at in school to having to deal with my family, day after day after day. If you haven't noticed by now, I'm going crazy. I can't keep doing this. I'm tired of coming home and having to carry my mom to bed or getting a call from my dad on the way home that the house probably isn't a safe place for me to go and that I should find a friend to hang out with in the meantime.

Back to my friends. I love them; they really are amazing people, but they're so busy all the time. I haven't properly hung out with them or talked to them since maybe August. I text them and message them on Facebook, but they barely ever reply. Whenever I go to see them in person before class starts in the morning, they always talk right over me or ignore me when I say hi (don't get me wrong; they do pay attention about a third of the time). Now things for them are starting to taper off; it's our senior year in high school, and the actor's guild is over for them. I don't understand why they haven't had any time for me when they have time for anyone else. I miss them.

So today, being incredibly frustrated and caught up in a nightmare I really never asked for, I texted them, begging them for help. I'm reaching the point where I can't do this anymore. I can't take care of my family and lose myself in the process anymore. I want to be a teenager; I want to go out and have fun. Each week, I smile and laugh maybe two or three times. I am not happy at all, and I don't think I was asking much at all from them: just a night to hang out and forget everything bad.

However, one of my friends quickly replied and made sure that I know that I need to try harder to be friends with them, that I need to "force" myself into their lives because they get busy and distracted. She also said that it's my fault we don't hang out. She said that I make their lives difficult and that I should put more effort in if I expected to get anything in return.

Excuse me. I believe I was the one who spent the last year asking to hang out, who took time out of my morning to track them down and try to have conversations with them only to be talked over, and who never said anything horrible when they needed me. Is it really that hard to just give me two or three hours out of their entire year?! What the f*ck! Since when do I not deserve to be treated like any of their other friends?

I'm sorry for this long rant, and if you read it, thank you. I am so incredibly upset and frustrated at these people I thought I could trust with my life. I don't know what to do now. Maybe just suck it up until I leave for college in the end of August?