…….and also never.
I have never needed Jeremy Bearimy more than I do right now. However, I wouldn’t know how to change things if I went back in time. I’d only be able to go with the flow, knowing what I know now. I don’t know if I would or wouldn’t survive Life on Mars. Either I’ll save humanity over and over, or I’ll take in the whole vortex. There is no in between.
I’ll decide in the car. Guess it depends on who’s driving.
If I had to go back in time, I would be Meagan’s friend and let go of the idea that we’d be good together. I was too wrapped up in my damage to pay attention, and it wasn’t fair to her. She just thought I was intense and weird, so she either went on a date with someone else or had a one night stand. She was also supposed to be a mutual friend, so seeing her after Meagan noped out wasn’t the best experience. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. It was written all over my body. It was more grief than I could carry. The relationship wasn’t fair to either of us, because I’m not the alpha dog…. or I wasn’t at 18. She found an alpha dog and married her. I was livid, and not for the reasons you think. I loved her more than me, and to see her commit for a lifetime to someone that would steamroll her every single day made my heart break into a million little pieces. My friend was fucked, and it only took about a decade for her to see it.
This is not blaming her. I just see how it is.
That’s because I love those type women as well. She had it together better than I did, but cut off from her emotions a good bit of the time. I only say that because my dad said I was after I started dating her. That I receded into my shell.
Hm. That has no bearing on “this thing we’ve created and managed.” My eyes are rolling out of my head. That phrase hurt worse than a one night stand. I never got laid, but I am well and truly fucked. It’s too much. And yet, 10 years is not nothing. I have the right to be upset for the time it takes for waves of tears to wash over shallower wells of injury. It doesn’t feel like the end of a romance with my beautiful girl. It feels like wondering where it all went. I know we both participated. I have owned my part. At the same time, the story will not go away.
It’s just that now, I like her character more than I like her. It’s painful, but it’s true. I love her like I love all my friends and family, but I don’t have to like her. She was not being very likable at last interaction, and neither was I because of it. If I start a letter with “I don’t want to fight about this,” the answer is generally not “you’re not getting what you need and I am not going to give you any more than three words. Die mad about it.” I am doing the work so that I don’t. She doesn’t get to steal happiness anymore.
She replaced it with fear that had nothing to do with either one of us. It was our filters for it. We fought because it was easy to read each other wrong and I felt constantly impaled. She would say that she wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been such an asshole to her, and she’s right. She has also been great about saying I’m forgiven and treated me like dog shit. So, which story do I believe? Do I believe that I am worthy of this treatment, or do I believe that what I did was eight years ago and she’s still a brick wall. It made me so angry that I realized I could not live that way anymore. I had just met Zac and reconnected with Bryn, and I felt settled in a way that I haven’t in a long time. I realized that because her dark begets dark, I couldn’t shine a light bright enough to get through to her. It was her choice to say “you are clearly not getting what you need, and I am hell bent on never giving it to you.” She created a fucking mess, and then blamed me for everything. But because I hurt her, what she did became totally invalid. I couldn’t have pain anymore. I couldn’t have issues anymore. Her right. Her barometer. She would not submit on it and admit that things had not gone as planned on either side.
She thought she was trash, and treated me as an extension.
I do not have to entertain her opinion anymore, but not wanting it is a whole other thing. If she wanted to break me, she did. I think she did want to break me, because when she’s angry she’s quiet as well. Her words reverberate, and she has never grasped how much. So, of course she doesn’t have to apologize. It wasn’t lashing out. If I hadn’t done what I did, she wouldn’t have been forced to treat me like shit until I gave up.
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
I needed her to pick up the clue phone, but I was always too much for her. If I am too much for you, now I don’t care how important you are in my life. This aggression will not stand, man. That’s because I’m an easy target to blame for other people’s refusal to look inside themselves. There’s never an actual conflict where we both present stories and try to figure out objective truth. Very few people do what I do, because they hate it. It’s too hard and it hurts too much. And yet, I do it anyway because it helped me to see what I was doing to participate in everything without doing the same thing to her. I didn’t make it all her fault. She saw it as that, but that’s because she was looking for it.
If your self esteem is so low that you cannot open up about anything due to fear of other people, you will hurt them. That’s because you’ll make everything about me. You didn’t do anything, I made you. If I hadn’t x, you wouldn’t have had to do y.
First of all, that’s bullshit. She acted too much like a victim for someone who supposedly forgave me. It was her damage, not mine. If she only needs to be hurt once to lock down forever, I’m out.
Our relationship devolved into as long as I agreed to do everything she said and keep quiet about anything that was bothering me, she was ready for anything. She actually said that I was the only one who ever trashed anything. It was a dick move on her part.
I didn’t respect her boundaries because she didn’t tell me what they were. I would just hit a land mine and she’d explode. I have the ability to make her feel things that other people don’t, because I can say it in a way that actually makes her emote. She just doesn’t do that for me. She gets angry at me and tells someone else.
Meanwhile, I am of the opinion that if the information goes out, it has to go to the right person.
She was my perfect picture of the companion that my INFJ personality profile said I’d get. She traded friendship for shallow communication because apparently it takes a very long time to write e-mails unless she’s telling me to fuck off. Those she takes time with.
Meanwhile, I know why she’s hurt. I know why she’s angry. I know why she cuts off her emotions. I can have sympathy for all that and still think she’s on a path of destruction. She can’t cancel everyone when they make a mistake.
If she goes through life treating everyone like me, that when they hurt her she recedes into her fortress and nopes out, that’s going to lead to a lot of short friendships. But that’s the view from where I sit. Maybe she has managed to meet people that never do anything that ruffles her feathers. For their sake, I hope so.
She’s a lot to lose, and if you piss her off, she’ll hold it over your head for the next 30 years. But she’ll also be nice and not tell you that.
It comes out when her actions and words don’t line up.
She treated me like I was sick when I wasn’t. My perception when she check in on my dad was that my mother died two or three days later, so she felt like she couldn’t tell me that she didn’t really want to be my friend, she just wanted to send me a compliment. At first, it felt like she pitied me, coddled me, anything to make me not get upset at anything. She walked on eggshells no matter what I did, because don’t upset the crazy person. She took away my agency.
She’d beat me emotionally like a southern mama with a hair brush,
I didn’t walk away because she deserved to take a shot at me. But she didn’t deserve eight years of it.
Meanwhile, I also walked on eggshells and tried to please her because I felt like she thought I was a threat. The truth is that I have never even been within 15 minutes of her, and when I truly tried to walk away, she wouldn’t let me go. She could say the same thing about me.
But she wouldn’t believe any of it.
Stories That Are All True 