Continuing on the saga of standing behind my choices even when others wish I wouldn’t, I have a story for you. But first, here is some context…
I have had quite a difficult time with my mental health in the last few months. Understandably so, it’s been a hard year in a lot of ways. I was warned that a crisis approaches the moment a student graduates from college. We no longer have an assigned structure to the way that we live our lives, or clear direction calming the part of our brains that deeply desires purpose for our lives. I know that the crisis that came for me this post graduation season was intertwined with a series of unresolved traumas and 21 year old growing pains, and boy did I not expect it to hit so hard! It is also winter time which seems to always be dangerously woeful for me. So, it is truly no wonder why my mental state sits in the sulks.
This choice I have made to move out of the town I currently live in and with my partner has sent me into a deep and heavy shame and guilt spiral. My mind convinces me that this choice to propel my life forward and to give myself exactly what I need will disappoint and devastate absolutely everyone in my community, leaving me isolated from the people that I love. To them my choice may seem abrupt or hasty and as good friends they will question me and voice their fears and hesitancies. After all, I do require genuine honesty in my relationships. Something that I have been trying to figure out for myself these last few months is who is a sincere friend to me that wants to support the true trajectory of my life, and who is simply around subconsciously motivated to take me for all I’ve got energetically. The true and tried friends in my life seem clear to me as fresh spring water hydrating my parched soul. When I am around them I feel truly seen and supported. My guards are safe to come down and I can show up as messy as I need to that day, except those true friends don’t see what I bring as messy. They see it as incredibly appreciated humanness that they are proud of me for bringing to the table so raw and honestly. All of these factors make it easy for me to tell that these people are who I want to dedicate more and more time and love to.
Now, there is a gray area within the relationship spectrum that I have a difficult time sorting through. This gray area houses the people that show elements of true friendship while also having aspects of themselves that seemingly trigger the shit out of me. Maybe a person from this category has supported me through a difficult phase of life I was going through and showed up for me during a time when I felt lonely and hopeless. Okay easy, meeting obvious friend criteria. At the same time, you find that this person angrily expresses their frustrations of you to other people when you aren’t around revealing that they don’t like the way you maneuver through the world, assuming your motives are vindictive and manipulative. Gray area. Apparently they don’t like that you do things differently as them and they wish you could simply conform to their expectations of you. Oh, and that help they selflessly offered you during that intense time in your life? They later tell you that any help that you may need should be sought elsewhere because the relationship to them is one-sided and there seems to be no room for them in your life…
For more context, asking for help for me is a distressfully hard thing for me to do. I don’t want to burden anyone with my weight because I know the shit I deal with is fucking crazy and heavy. When I can actually get to the point where I ask for help from someone I have believed to be a friend, I shower them with check ins and lay so obviously on the table the safety in open communication around what they need from me or if they need to shift away from helping me in order to take care of themselves. I can’t express how frequently I am checking in on the helping friend. My anxiety leaves me no other choice for God’s sake! So when out of what feels like nowhere I am being told that I need to find other routes for support because the friendship feels one-sided, the comment leaves me spinning and wonderstruck. Especially when this experience wouldn’t have even been shared if I didn’t inquire due to feeling an undeniable shift in energy.
My confrontation about my confusion leads them to panic and emotionally escalate things. A guilt trip follows, informing me that since there are other people that I seem to be more connected with (romantically) and since those feelings aren’t returned to them in particular then I should look to those “stronger” connections instead. Making me feel like I did something wrong for asking a friend for help when I had intimate connections in my life. I had no idea that this person even still had feelings for me but apparently it was my responsibility to figure it out and be compassionate for their pain of experiencing unreciprocated feelings. The conversation sends my nervous system to an unsafe place and leads me to sob uncontrollably while the room spins all around me. My breath can’t quite get deep enough and my requests for distance from the other person are completely ignored as they crowd my personal bubble. Every step taken away from them is met with two steps towards me. I feel trapped and suffocated by their presence. My mind frantically tries to understand the situation at hand and search for logic, except my brain is shifted into survival so that search can only be so productive. I am left feeling guilty and ashamed for how I’ve leaned into this friendship and confused if I am truly a good person. I thought I did everything right. I put so much anxious effort into keeping this from happening so why the hell is it happening? The conversation comes to an end due to a scheduled commitment and a forced hug closes our conversation. Reality shock and shame flood my mind for the rest of the week.
As I’m writing this it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that there shouldn’t be a gray area in friendships and that the more I get the experience outside of my brain I realize that who I describe is not a friend to me. But, there is more to the story and I’m in rant mode now baby!
A similar experience happens once again when this person finds out that I am moving in with my partner. But first, they of course have to prime me with days of distance and cold shouldering. Once I inquired about the weird energy, I found that it was due to the fact that they heard I was moving in with my partner and were shocked to not hear it from me first, which I can understand. It had been a rough few days for me mentally since they had been back in town and handling myself was a priority over informing this “friend” in my mind. The conversation emotionally escalates once again and I am caught in a deep panic attack and can’t even see straight. Deeply triggered. Once again, every step I take away from the situation is met with two steps towards me until the person is standing uncomfortably close to me, which they always tend to do. The “friend” continues to explain to me the flaws in my choice to move and tries convincing me that I am just running away from my problems. They tell me that they have been talking to their whole family about my decision and the fact that there is an age gap in my relationship means that it will most likely fail. They tell me that they are also probably going to move away since I won’t be living here anymore. I leave the conversation feeling ripped to pieces. My head is throbbing, I can’t see straight and my heart feels deeply achy. I am still confused about what had happened in that conversation. The rest of the day I am left trying to recover from this emotional explosion.
Today, I woke up angry. My boundaries have been fucking crossed too often and I know it’s my fault for not being clear on that along the way. Hindsight is 20/20 after all… Remember when I told y’all to make decisions by following the good feeling? Well, when I lean into this situation with this “friend,” good is probably the last word I would use to describe what I’m feeling. Complete rage and a trigger hangover floods my human experience this morning and I can’t even fathom the idea of continuing interacting with this person. We’ve tried to be friends and I don’t think either of us are better for it sooo I think it’s time to put this suffering connection out of its misery.
As I read what I’ve written so far, I realize that you guys have been a witness to my mental process with processing a realization where I’ve let someone cross my boundaries time and time again. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I have put myself in this sort of situation. Instead, it’s a toxic cycle I shockingly find myself in and now I’m beginning to wonder if that optimistic lens I view the world through is a label I ignorantly painted over naive innocence. My experience with male friends throughout my life has been sticky, confusing, and leaves me sore from whiplash. Let me tell you something, when self labeled “nice guys” begin to dedicate more of their time and energy to you, even after warning them that you aren’t interested in them romantically, proceed with fucking caution. Choosing to trust that others will openly communicate with me as much as I do with them has led me to be easily manipulated into situations that give me that sort of wisdom you can only get from the experience of betrayal. Men that have labeled themselves as my friend have been caught stalking me, threatening me, harassing me, sexually exploiting me…Even after all of that I gave them the benefit of the doubt, because they were my friends and I couldn’t imagine that they would choose to hurt me on purpose. I have learned that intentions and actions should be judged a bit differently. No matter what the intention was, the most important thing is how an action made you feel. If you continuously excuse someone’s behavior because you assume that their intentions are pure and their execution simply confused then you will teach them that they can cross your boundaries as long as they know how to reason with you after the fact. They can get what they want from you and remain safe from being villainized when they learn your highest held appreciation for communication.
My partner teases me about the fact that I call someone my friend as soon as I’ve been introduced to them. He literally has illustrated 3 groups of people for me to categorize connections I make. He even connects the energy expected towards each of the various groups. Group number 1 is the friend group. These are people that you truly make an effort to connect with and you can be all states of yourself around them and feel supported and seen. They also return that same effort. Friends are the ones that are safe to confide in, reveal yourself fully to, and you can rest and heal in their loving energy. C has me analyze the list of people I commune with and name the people that belong in that category for me. He counts the friends I list to remind me that I only have so much true energy to give and it’s unrealistic to give yourself so fully to 15 different people. There are only 7 days in the week for crying out loud! I recite my list and upon doing so I begin to feel warm, golden and safe inside, confirming that these people are in fact my soul family. I also can’t help but notice that this family is filled mostly with female identifying folk…
The next series of people are considered acquaintances. Acquaintances are people that you’ve met but have not intimately interacted with. You haven’t had the opportunity to build a friendship for whatever reason. Maybe you only truly see them at social gatherings. You don’t necessarily need to spend too much time worrying about whether you’ve checked in with them lately or not, or feel guilty about not reaching out to hang out with them. They haven’t really earned the right yet to your deeply personal stories. A filter is still somewhat applied on our conversations at this point. Having a way to categorize the connections in my life is extremely helpful for me to direct my energy clearer through a narrower scope. My head is constantly spinning with thoughts of other people and the tone of thought is typically intense worry. I’m thinking of every person I have ever met, too. No wonder I always have a headache, man.
C also helps me to understand that another thing to consider with these different groups of people is the fact that none of them are a priority over myself. I can’t pour into any of those connections if my personal well is bone dry. I am living my life and no one else’s opinion should make me second guess my own. I know that I take time to formulate opinions because I need to see things from all angles before making a personal conclusion. I can trust myself, I just need to practice.
The “friend” that I described earlier falls into a different category altogether. This category houses the ones that I have connected with in some way, yet they have crossed an important boundary and I no longer feel safe interacting with them. We will call this crew The Rejects, because humor is my coping mechanism… Upon analysis and sound-boarding with my audience I have come to the conclusion that this “friend” has shifted into The Rejects group. Can we all confirm that this is the right decision?
Nope, just kidding! I don’t need your input to confirm what I already know about my own life. See? I’m practicing!
I wanted to share this personal story with you to potentially help you work out if someone is actually a friend to you or not. Maybe you also have a tendency to spread yourself too thin and personally suffer the consequences of that. Or maybe you just struggle with letting people go, at your own detriment. This lesson has been a long journey to commit to and I stay confused and unsure even still, but this is how I have learned to make navigating connections less challenging for myself. If any of you are struggling with connections in your life and need some sort of clarity on what you’re dealing with please feel free to message me a synopsis of your story and I would love to soundboard with you from a completely unbiased lens. Remember, it’s beautiful to have such an open and flowing heart, and it’s okay to have some healing to do from the trauma of not knowing your own boundaries. You are doing the best you can on your own and I am so proud of your efforts. If we all want to put in the effort of building this space to become a completely safe place for people to come when they need help with something involving their personal journeys, this could become a really wonderful community to lean into.
“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” – Peter Levine
Let us be an empathetic witness for one another and feel into the healing that follows.
With love,
KN
