“They cause the fire but then they get offended when you walk out of the smoke, when you finally choose you, not for applause or out of spite, but because your nervous system is tired of calling survival love.  Choosing peace when you’ve been through emotional warfare isn’t selfish it’s CPR,” Jay Douglas.  I have a group of people I’ve considered friends for a little over 3 years now and the relationships have dramatically shifted.  I always thought friendship meant making other people happy to keep them around even if that meant bending to the point of breaking or sacrificing what really couldn’t be sacrificed.  Giving time, energy, effort, and attention to people who I would be there for at the drop of a hat but couldn’t be found when the water was raging in.  Recently the group took another turn and I’ve found myself on the outs with them, this time I believe for good.  And here’s the thing: everyone feels like a victim at some point, I know that.  We can all play victim all we want.  But when I was working through the list of things I wanted to address to get some understanding between us, the realization hit me that friends wouldn’t require an explanation that this is bad behavior and they would have stopped the first time a friend raised an issue.  That isn’t what happened.  And then I heard today’s quote.

I realized that this has been a pattern for me: always finding a way to make it work, even things that really shouldn’t work.  I’ve always bent to accommodate what other people wanted because I thought my role was to make other people happy.  I was raised and treated with the belief that if I got upset when someone crossed a boundary I was a bitch and I was a bitch if I raised my voice to express what I wanted.  But then the pattern shifted to me being a bitch because I SET the boundary.  I confused that with ego, thinking that I was too egotistical because I set the boundary and then I’d let people walk over it and get hurt and they’d get mad if I said I was hurt.  So I struggled to find balance and in this group I thought I had found some semblance of acceptance and understanding until the pattern started to repeat itself.  This time I didn’t quiet down.  I’d bent myself silly and finally said something and when they got mad, I didn’t bend again.  I realized that not only had they started the fire, there were times I’d gone so far as to set the fire FOR them and they still looked at me like I was the problem.  I could have done EVERYTHING for these people and, at the end of the day, they still would have found some issue with me setting that boundary/being who I am.

I went through an exercise writing a letter to work through this, unsure if I would give it to them.  The first draft was really angry and it bit—it also hit on all the points where I was still tender from their shots.  I then went soft, trying to find where I was responsible for this miscommunication as well and trying to find a way to make it work.  The third attempt was somewhere in between, voicing my concerns clearly while acknowledging my part.  But what was funny in that third attempt is that as I was listing out all of the things I wanted to discuss/get understanding of, it hit me like a lead balloon that I wouldn’t have to explain this to friends and friends wouldn’t have done all of this stuff in the first place.  All of the red flags I’d looked past for the last 3 years, the lies, the exclusion from tons of events after I’d fought to bring them in my life, the disregard for my/my family’s feelings while their feelings were law…none of that goes on between friends.  So the question became why am I trying to salvage these relationships with people who don’t give a shit let alone standing so close to the fire after they poured the kerosene? 

That is a pattern I’m ok with breaking.  Sure there are some implications for my son because he is friends with some of their kids, but I need to be an example that self-respect isn’t about making ourselves convenient, it’s about being who we are even if it makes others uncomfortable.  It’s about telling people what we are/aren’t willing to accept in our presence and knowing our value.  Value means more than what we are willing to give up for someone else—value is knowing when to walk away from those who seek the chaos, those who fan the flames, those who light the match and then wonder why you ran.  I’ve struggled with these decisions over the last several weeks but the truth is, when we look at the reality of the situation and understand that people who care about each other don’t treat each other like this, then it makes it all the easier to walk away.  Sure, I can own my part in the pieces where I could be a better friend but I was never malicious even if I was sloppy/forgetful at times.  As I gave grace to them, I had hoped they would do the same for me but that didn’t happen.  And that is ok.  I don’t have to be everyone’s cup of tea.  I’ve learned to carry my own and I will carry on.  And I am ok. As Jay Douglas says, “I don’t need you to understand why I left because I’m done explaining my boundaries to people who only respected me when I had none.”