Letting go
It has been far too long since the last entry, and I apologise for that (who reads this blog anyway). The short version is that I have been under the weather, not in the physical sense, but in the way that happens when something goes wrong with a friendship and you need a while to process it and come back to yourself. I have done that now, or close enough to it that I feel ready to sit down and write again, which is usually how I know I am actually fine rather than just telling myself I am.
So... hello again. Let us talk about something that has been on my mind!
About a year or two ago, I can't even remember truth be told, I ended a friendship with a group of people I had known for over a decade. Not a fight, not a dramatic falling out with a clear inciting incident that I can point to and say: there, that is where it ended. Just a slow and honest reckoning with the fact that it was not working, had not been working for a long time, and was not going to start working simply because I had known these people long enough to feel like I owed them the benefit of the doubt indefinitely.
I let it go. It was one of the better decisions I have made in recent years, and it was also one of the hardest, and both of those things have been true every single day since.
The reason it is on my mind now is that the more recent situation, the one that kept me away from here, rhymes with it in ways I have been thinking about.
Here is the thing about friendship that I think does not get said clearly enough EVER: it has to go in both directions, and when it does not, no amount of effort on one side is going to fix that.
Yeah, yeah, this sounds obvious. It is obvious. And yet a very large number of people, myself included at various points, spend such a long time not applying it, because the heart is an extremely bad accountant and consistently refuses to acknowledge a deficit when one exists.
(That was very Kingdom Hearts-ish, was it?)
But yeah, you can tell yourself that people show love differently. That some people are bad at communicating. That they are going through something. That if you are just patient enough, present enough, understanding enough, the thing you thought this friendship was will eventually become the thing it actually is. Sometimes this is true. More often, you are doing the emotional equivalent of lending out your Game Boy games and expecting to get them back.
What I have learned, mostly the hard way and occasionally the very hard way, is that the people who love you will find a way to show it. Not perfectly, not without gaps or failures or the occasional spectacular misunderstanding, but consistently and in a direction that is clearly toward you rather than past you.
The ones who do not: at a certain point you have to look at the evidence clearly and honestly, without the distortion of shared history or sunk cost, and ask yourself what you are actually holding onto and why.
Sometimes the answer is that the friendship changed and neither of you noticed until the distance had become too wide to close comfortably. That is nobody's fault and it is still sad.
Sometimes the answer is harder: that you were loved less than you loved, or perhaps not at all in the way you thought, and that the version of this friendship that existed in your head was doing a lot of work that the actual friendship was not.
That second answer is the one that takes longer to sit with. It requires you to grieve something that may not have existed the way you believed it did, which is a strange and specific kind of loss. But it is also the one that, once you have fully sat with it, leaves you lighter, because you are no longer carrying something that was already empty. Because the energy you were spending on maintenance goes back to you, and to the people who actually want it.
Let it go. Not with bitterness, if you can manage it, because bitterness is heavy and you have already been carrying enough. Just let it go with honesty and with the quiet understanding that your time and your love are worth giving to people who will give them back.
The right people are out there. I know this because I have found some of them, and they are the reason I know what I was missing!
It is good to be back.