So I realized I hadn’t written a) at all in a while and b) about anything politically-tinted here. I added “here” because the reason why I’ve been so sporadic and chaotic lately is that I finished my MA program aka I wrote my monumental thesis. And now it’s done.

But something that I noticed throughout these past few months/years, to get right into it and stop blabbering, is that my friends have started to change their behaviour towards me as I have become more partisan, or more actively involved in politics. And as you can imagine, it has not been quite an endearing journey. Nor has it been totally a failure, I give credit to some of my friends who realized that no matter what I believe in, or say, I am still a human being, with personal failures and successes, with friends, who goes out, shops, reads fiction, watches tv, desperately awaits a certain movie or other to come out, etc. And they seem fine with it.

The opposite is also true though, that when some of my own friends “come out of the political closet” as I like to call it (don’t over think it, I just couldn’t think of any other imagery to compare the situation), I also change the way I behave towards them, what I feel at ease to discuss around them, whether we go to a certain cafe or other depending if they serve fair trade products there, or not. And personally I can’t explain it, but I think it might be like a defence mechanism to protect ourselves from them, or upsetting them (in the case that we still remain friends), because something completely strange might happen, actually 2 things, as follows:

1. we are being asked not to get brainwashed by our “new-found” political beliefs aka what I get out of this, and yes I’ve been told that, is not to change too much because who knows what might happen? To us individually and to our friendship? OR 

2. our friends stop talking to us, or slowly give up on us altogether because they feel we no longer have much/anything in common. And this, too, has happened to me personally, which also made me think of who my friends are, what friendships are based on etc.

This time around I don’t have a definite answer, or grand explanation to provide, nor do I want to, but I want to leave it open-ended, and maybe get some feedback, from followers or friends: would your impression of a friend change if you found out they had a different political colour from yours? If so then how, or why do you think that????