Sometimes in my own head it feels like I purposely set up a friendship to fail. In some ways I definitely did, I can take ownership of that because the friend did exactly as I anticipated, and knowing that part of me feels responsible for helping push the wheel in motion. But they say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I had to push this wheel to confirm what I knew was already true. That our friendship had been over for awhile and I was simply being used because I didn’t want to end something I put so much of myself into.

It was a ten year “friendship” that really centered around our careers, my wanting to be a photographer, him wanting to be a performer and the journey toward making it happen. But in the beginning it wasn’t just pure ambition blindly leading us and forging a friendship, we invested the hours and learned about each other.

But as things go with growing success the friendship became more business, the investment in each other turned slowly more and more to projects to grow our careers and not keeping a healthy relationship.

I am as guilty as my friend, I can own up to it, though I recognized it and tried to correct my behavior so it felt less surprising that I knew more about his life, his goals, his family, his stresses than he knew about mine in the end. After all I asked, and I listened. He did too but rushed my responses and I could tell didn’t truly listen to me as he parried into his next ask for his business growth.

See in the end I heard from him only when he needed my skills and services. And I resented that, deeply. I stopped reaching out because I was mad I was a mere second thought only when he had use of me. That resentment built into remarks and pressing for payments and things I needed for my business.

Yet they were summarily ignored until it finally cumulated in the conversations, the hurtful words that started the chain of events to not just breaking the friendship but burning the bridge entirely with each other.

Words are a deeply powerful thing, as are actions, I always believed in this friend and wanted to see his success as much as my own so I never put a price tag on my work. I never once charged him. But this last time he asked what he owed after we had been fighting and I wanted to show him my value in terms he would understand since the decade of work for him was so easily tossed under the bus with his words “you never do what I ask, just what you think is best.” (As if in an artistic medium what is asked is what always works the best 🙄).

I was hurt, and hell I was pissed off over those words so I made up a bill for our last and final photoshoot. A bill that wasn’t a fraction of what I would charge my normal clients, it was discounted because “friends” and because I was truly curious as to if he would actually pay it.

Turns out he wouldn’t, but would tell me my work wasn’t worth the mere two hundred and odd dollars I was asking. It was at that point I knew my value to him only mattered in one being good at what I did and two giving it to him because we are friends.

And from that is how the true breaking occurred. How I decided if he needed to see my true value then I would charge him as if he was a client who wasn’t a friend, a business client intending to use my work for his profit. Read about it in the excerpt from my book Glass Eyes: A Photographers Journey, which is available online with all major retailers.