Tag Archives: Friendship

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Of Great Value

You know when you realize how important something is to you right? When you lose it.

You may think you know, you may believe that you understand and respect the importance of a thing but it’s my belief that it’s a failing of human culture to take things for granted until you no longer have that luxury.

I lost my best friend. In fact a lot of spectacularly shitty things have occurred since I wrote anything last. For fear of a negative diatribe that would be splattered all over social media I just restrained myself from venting. I mean hey, a few bitter status updates may have slipped out as I’m only human. But now I write because I lost my best friend.

So like I was saying, I could have gone on for hours before this happened about how I realized how important he was, how special I knew he was, but until today when he was 100% completely gone I had no clue that he possessed such a large piece of my heart. And that I would be so lost without him.

I’ve been through bad relationships, I’ve been through violence, I’ve been through hard work, poverty, and I’m raising kids which is it’s own special kind of hell and heaven mixed together. But I always had a best friend. That person I call at 2am. The person that can look at me and know that something is bothering me. The only one person in the world that can reach into my worst hysterical emotional panic attack and drag me back into my safe happy place. For god’s sake the man built my happy place.

Why did it end? It doesn’t really matter. Not my fault, not his fault. It just had to end and there was nothing I could do to change it.

I once went to a counselor after a very traumatizing break up. He drew a diagram of healthy relationship and unhealthy relationships. He drew two circles and in the first diagram he drew them side by side. He said, “Imagine the circles are you and your partner. This is a relationship where both people are so independent that they don’t need anything from one another, they exist as solitary creatures within a committed union. It requires very little communication, and this is unhealthy.”                                                                             He drew another two circles this time they intersected but almost so completely that they appeared to be one circle. ” This is a relationship were it is so dependant that you can not ascertain where one person ends and the other begins. There is almost no independence and tell me Shauna, what do you get if someone leaves this relationship?” He erased one circle. What remained was the other circle looking like a sliver of a moon. “One person is almost always left as a shell of who they used to be. They aren’t whole any longer and functionality is near impossible. They depended on their partner too much, to the point where they can’t function without them.”

As a person with deep-rooted abandonment issues, that overly dependent style was almost always the way my relationships look near the end. Even my friendships.

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 This is a healthy relationship. Where independence is maintained yet a balance of dependence is also rooted in the union.

 

Ok so you all know where this is leading right? I’m single with two kids and the only person in the entire world I had left is gone. You know the only option for me now right? I have to make friends with someone I really don’t like very much. Someone who is over emotional, clingy, blunt, insecure, a bad decision maker, desperate, a loner…. just an overall mess of a human being…..

Yep, that bitch.

How the hell am I supposed to make friends with someone I’ve lived with for 28 years and still can’t stand to be alone with?? Her only redeeming quality is she is the mother of my children…

SIGH

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You’ve Lost Weight Since I’ve Seen You Last

Regained a good friend today.

Technically if we’re going by my account of things, we never stopped being friends. If you go by his version it may be different I’m not sure. In the course of our, what? Four-five year friendship we have fallen apart from each other a few times. Once because he loved me too much, once because I loved him too much and a few times because we didn’t like the people the other surrounded himself or herself with.

But. We always came back to our friendship. It was very deep and in my opinion it couldn’t be broken. The problem now is that I’m very on edge about it, fearing we may drift in opposite directions again. I’m nervous to invest even with my previous investment still sitting in no man’s land.

This led me to thinking though. If you experience the same thing from a relationship (friendship or otherwise) over and over again…. do you guard yourself without realizing it? Do you hold back in fear of the same bad patterns repeating themselves once again? Can you trust?

I figure most of the time you try, but to some extent subconsciously, you can’t help but to guard yourself.

 Caring for and loving people is a tricky business. Especially with friends. There are just so many other people influencing every moment you relate. Different opinions. Different experiences. It’s a wonder you can find anyone in this world you can single out and call them your true friend.

Myself, I’ve been hurt by friends and others more times than I could count. Frankly, if I had guarded myself more I would have saved myself a lot of heartache. But it also wouldn’t have been authentic. You can accuse me of many things, heck go ahead call me crazy if you’d like but you can’t say I’m not real. And if you’re my friend and I love you, no matter what you and I have been through or how many tears and sleepless nights you may have caused me….. I don’t change how I feel. That subconscious guarded wall may or may not be there but that isn’t something I can control, hopefully it doesn’t change things too severely.

So leap of faith again. I’m going to sleep now, hopefully in the morning I haven’t lost any friends or gained any enemies. I put love out there in the hope that it’s mostly what I’ll get back.