My Full On Epiphany

So a few months back, I had what I thought was an epiphany. I have a friend called Jay, and Tess liked him too, then all of a sudden, boom! She didn't want me to have anything to do with him and she kept pulling a face of pure revulsion when he came up in conversation. I thought to myself, well he hasn't done anything to me so why should I care what he's done to anyone else? Yes, that was my epiphany, to not care about what anybody said about my friends, to trust my own experiences with them, to choose my own friends and not have them chosen for me. This seemed to work, or so I thought, but yesterday I received a message on facebook; it was a cross between an apology and an explanation from somebody who I believed to have hated me - we've been at each others necks for a while. That's when it struck me. The main reason I was so 'against' her was simply because that's what I was expected to be. I was expected to hate her, and to be unsympathetic to her, and to not show any doubt in what my actions said about my feelings towards her. This sounds petty, but I can say without a doubt that this was the case with her too. My epiphany a few weeks ago was good, but it wasn't a full on epiphany. This was. This was the next step, building on what I'd thought a few weeks ago. I read this facebook message and thought to myself, why should I conform to anybody's expectations of how I act and who I like? It was so subconscious that I'd had no idea it had been happening, and I'm not ashamed either, in fact I'm proud that I can see that now. By discovering this, I can now confront it and try to be the best person I possibly can be.