One time after a really difficult situation seemed to have passed, I was ready to hit the ground running with a comeback I had been planning in my heart for years. I loved the people in my life that I was close to and wanted to keep my relationship with them a priority, but I was ready to have a few things in my life that were “mine” instead of solely “ours.” Sometimes a soul just needs to do what is theirs alone to be done.
An amazing friend seemed to pick up on that and privately advised me to really value my close relationships and keep them an immediate priority. That friend had all the love and wisdom and character in the world so I highly valued his perspective and continued to delay things that only mattered to me. I thought maybe I was just being selfish and needed to hear his perspective.
In hindsight, I was right for once. The people I was close to looked incredibly different when I had the chance to grow into my own person away from them and gain perspective on things without their increasingly suffocating and selfish perspectives constantly overpowering me. Somewhere in me I had known certain things were far from perfect, but I chose denial as my main coping mechanism. As a weak willed person who fell for a lot of manipulation, the people never thought that I was capable of such independent strength and as I eventually went back to my plan to pursue dreams that only mattered to me, they chose to hatefully blame my change in behavior on the very man who had advised me to prioritize my relationship with them.
Don’t the best of them bleed it out while the rest of them peter out? … There goes my hero, watch him as he goes! – Foo Fighters
While I may have been right that I needed to pursue things that only mattered to me, I never expected things to take such wild and dramatic and distressing turns. The positive thing is that I did stay around long enough for events to unfold and learn hard truths that I would not have learned otherwise. If I had begun to grow more independent earlier, I may have blamed myself or stayed in denial or held fast to some other less than fully true viewpoint when things deteriorated. Now I know I gave everything I had and more but it was never enough.
And I know I may end up failing too, but I know you were just like me with someone disappointed in you. – Linkin Park
After being in long term circumstances that were difficult and isolating, I could not wait to connect to community with others in a way in which I could be a blessing beyond my small world. It felt so useless to be so alone.
But then the first person who is kind to me soon becomes the target of such unspeakable venom because of that kindness to me. My circumstances and my own ignorance brought about the complete opposite of what I hoped for and now someone else has to pay a price worse than anything I am facing. At some point I have to do the whole let go and let God thing and know that God is looking out for a heroically good natured person, but for now I just wish I could have a bright idea and make everything better and overcome evil with good through the ingenuity He has already given me.
I hate that my life brought pain to someone else’s life in this manner and it is difficult to just be okay with that. If I light enough candles or bother the Blessed Virgin Mary enough to go petition Jesus or pray enough Novenas, maybe I will get to see how God turns such sad things around to bring about the good of the person who was kind to me. I don’t understand how I could have done any better at the time, but surely I will think of something and learn from it and never let it happen again. For now, I work on building a peace within myself that is greater than my circumstances and just bother God a lot and that is how I’ve got this.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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