I’ve been in love with a fair few things that have caused my life to feel worse; isolation, diet culture, wine, under-attentiveness, drugs, jeans that cut into my belly, vodka, the endless pursual of validation via dating and casual flings,
over attentiveness, the endless pursuit of oxytocin via a thing that is going nowhere,
the constant cycle of getting together and growing apart, social media, whisky,
the person who should have stayed a mentor but became a lover,
the person who should have remained a friend but became one of the hopeless flings I mentioned.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek about those last two. After all, those folk showed me a thing or two about myself; gaps where my boundaries should have been. I’m not sure I believe that another person can make our lives worse in the long run, except perhaps in some cases of abuse and non-consent. But I believe that the choices we make daily to keep someone in our life,
the contracts we accept, the draining dynamics,
the settling for less and the patterns that emerge can invariably make our lives feel worse. I’m no longer interested in choosing these, regardless of habit or history.
Last year I noticed a peculiar weight in my stomach whenever I agreed to meet with a particular friend. The friend in question is warm, electric, so charming. I love him, and we go back a long while. But there has always been a shady room inside of our friendship. We’re in the same line of work, and for some reason, I never felt safe sharing my dreams, ideas and projects. He did not appear to feel safe talking about his. He is pretty competitive; I am less so. While neither of our natures is wrong, if I’m being honest, it made me close up. It affected how we spoke with and related to each other. I hid my small wins, the things I was proud of and deserved to celebrate, because I felt awkward about them. He didn’t speak about his work at all. Ever. Creative community is essential to both of us; still, we mistook our protective behaviour for secrecy, individualism, for shutting the other one out. Perhaps we weren’t mistaking anything, because it really was like that. We connected on so many other things and I thought it was strange for a long time but never said anything.
Of course, I see my massive part in all this. If I had been truly awake to it, I could have changed things. So what if there was some healthy competition? I could have spoken about it. We could have laughed about it, thus empowering each other to change our communication style inside a tiny world where we could each have used support. All those years I never did and by the time I dared address it, it was clear that the resentments had become larger than the room they were locked in and were spilling into the house.
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