A belated new year's resolution

Feb 06, 2020 13:28


I have to admit that starting to write on here again has been strangely refreshing, and I’m taking so much pleasure in being able to express my thoughts into written words once more… without an audience. Especially without an audience. What have I done since I rediscovered this blog after so many years?

One of the things that I’ve done is… reached out to some of the people who I used to post about constantly. Friends that I haven’t spoken to in months, sometimes years. I logged into my old Photobucket account and downloaded some of the pictures that I’d uploaded there and embedded here ages ago. And then I sent them to those friends and said, “OMG, do you remember this?!”

And then we spent hours just revisiting our awesome escapades from ages past. And the memories are so incredibly fun to relive. I once posted something here about how we tend to remember the good things. That the good memories persist in our minds for so much longer than the bad ones. They were seen and experienced through rose-tinted lenses filtered with the sound of laughter, screams and spoken gibberish. How can memories like that not bring a smile to your face?

I also realized something… that I have not been a very good friend. Or at least, I haven’t been a very constant one. For the past few years, I’ve been tunnel-visioned, totally focused on something that my old friends couldn’t comprehend. And because they couldn’t comprehend, I excluded from most of the events that unfolded in my life.

I made a circle of vastly different friends, like-minded people who didn’t and wouldn’t think that I’m crazy. And for the past maybe 4 years, they’ve been the only people that I looked forward to talking to. Most of them don’t even live anywhere nearby. But we bonded through our shared passion for dog showing. It’s this giant crazy world all on its own, with a set of old-world rules that cascaded down from the longtime stewards of the sport. I guess being 100% involved in any sort of hobby tends to have that effect-they’re always contained in a tight bubble that outsiders find difficult to comprehend.

It has taken a gigantic chunk of my life, and with it, my very limited time as I am so utterly busy every day, day in and day out. I wouldn’t change it for the world, but I do miss the relationships that I used to have with people around me. They live all over the world now, but being separated by oceans and a dozen timezones was never a deterrent to me before.

I’ve been reduced to sending them only sporadic messages to find out how they’re doing… after quitting several chat groups on WhatsApp because I just couldn’t stand seeing the incessant "new message" notification symbol on my phone screen. I was actively trying to disassociate myself from the people that I used to know and love, and I’ve done it incredibly well.

Fortunately for me, though, in the process I’ve also made a few new friends who’ve proven an invaluable source of constant support, and I know that in them I have true friends that I can always count on no matter what happens.

I’ve never been one to make new year’s resolutions, mostly because I’d always forgotten them by the time February rolled around… but this year, I’m going to take on the challenge of rekindling my friendships with people who’ve been gone from my life for many years. I’m going to make an effort to ask them what’s up, how they’re doing, and I’m going to be there for them if they need me. Like I used to.

I used to always be the listener, the shoulder to cry on, the dispenser of wise advice. I was always the voice of reason, the calm after the storm, and my friends used to lean on my level-headedness.

I’m going to consciously try and be that again. A solid person who people can trust and rely on. Someone worth entrusting with secrets and fears.

My second resolution is… frankly, not something that I ever envisioned myself trying to achieve, but it involves trying to undo the person that I’ve unwittingly turned myself into in the past… I want to say “few years”, but it’s really been a lot longer than that, and I hope that now is when it ends.

It all started several days ago, when my brother told me about how his newly-ex-girlfriend was reacting to being ignored by him. I wisely advised him to abandon his plan to ghost her, and instead to just come clean and tell her the truth. And then I reflected upon the numerous times in my life that I’d ghosted people myself. I did it a lot. A lot, a massive amount when I was younger and couldn’t figure out my feelings and how to express anger, uncertainty or fear. I did it to all sorts of people, even close friends.

I remember clearly the first time I did it. I was 18 (how come it seems like every pivotal moment in my life happened when I was 18?! I can’t decide if that’s cliched or a creepy coincidence), I found out from someone that one of my best friends had  told A LOT of people something that I told her in confidence. It was a massive betrayal of trust, and I found it so incredibly hard to even look at her again. Within hours of learning about what she did, I decided to cut her out of my life completely, without so much as a backward glance. I replied to none of her texts. I refused to answer any of her calls. I avoided her in public, and even when I bumped into her at a press event 10 years later, I looked straight through her and pretended that she didn’t exist.

I’m pretty sure that she understood none of it, and so she came to erroneous conclusions of her own (she ended up vilifying the person who’d told me the truth in the first place, effectively shooting the messenger). I’d never felt bad for doing what I did, and in subsequent years, whenever anyone hurt me, I reflexively just cut them off like a deadweight. No explanations, no goodbyes, nothing. I’d be there one day and vanish into thin air the next.

I realize now that even though I would never forgive most of these people that I’ve walked away from, that they at least deserved an explanation. It’s really not nice to leave people hanging, wondering why. And this habit of mine has not only hurt them, it’s turned me into a really cold, hard person with very jagged edges. I’ve acted like a total heartless bitch on numerous occasions, and it’s because when I was hurt, I lashed out like a wounded creature. It was too painful to admit any weakness, it was too hard to say, “you hurt me, I’m in pain, why?? Why did you do it?”. It was just far easier to shove those feelings into an abyss and focus on only the anger.

So, instead of getting sad, I got mad. I refused to be pitied, I refused to be beaten down. I responded to cruelty with even more cruelty. I was ruthless, and I felt nothing. I told myself that I didn’t care how much I hurt them in return. As long as I wasn’t the one on the losing end, I’d won. It didn’t matter that the winning brought me nothing-not happiness, not glory. It was revenge, pure and simple. And shockingly, I learned that the absolute cruelest thing that you can do to someone is not to yell, scream, or throw a tantrum. The worst thing that you can do is to cut them off so swiftly that they’ll never even know what hit them. You give away nothing so that nobody is able to find any evidence of your having been cruel. Because, really… who’s going to label ignoring someone instead of blowing up as cruel? You steel your heart, you put on a sardonic smile and then you turn around and march off into the sunset. You leave them with nothing. Not even a meagre understanding of what they did wrong.

I have been doing it so well that it has taken me this long to realize the kind of person doing it has turned me into. I used to be sensitive, soft. I used to be capable of feeling immense joy and immense sadness. I don’t anymore. I traded my previously infinite range of emotion with a limited one. I feel like I made a deal with the devil-no more pain in exchange for my soul, blemished as it may be.

I am not sure if it’s possible to revert to Su Ann 1.0. She is probably lost to time. But I’m going to stop dropping people like flies without a second thought. Nobody deserves to be treated that way, without any answers to derive closure from. Everyone deserves an explanation, even one that is hard to hear. I’m going to try my best to be honest now. To calmly and rationally explain why, instead of just disappearing into thin air. Maybe if I start with this baby step, I can redeem my soul. It may not be the same as the one I had when I was 18, but if I start now, it will be infinitely better than having not having one at all.
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