Yesterday was hard. I had a Difficult Conversation with someone who I have been friends with for many years. We have been friends for many years, and nominally close therein, but the past couple of months I have been remembering things about this person that I had conveniently forgotten during our time apart. Little things, like how confused or upset this person makes me feel sometimes. Like how I end up feeling like an asshole because I feel like they find a way to somehow make everything about them and then I feel guilty for feeling that way. This person is very lovely in many ways, and charismatic, so my feelings, which I usually listen to with commitment when it comes to what they’re telling me about someone, seemed off compared to what everyone else thinks and feels about this person. People are drawn to this person.
But the little things kept piling up, and then yesterday we had a difficult conversation about some of those things and it became apparent to me, in the course of dealing with the fall-out throughout the rest of the day (this involved several conversations with trusted advisers), that my instincts were not off. That this person is actually, in addition to being lovely, might possibly be incapable of thinking of others who are close to them in a meaningful way. Dealing with people like this happens to be wheelhouse in many ways, so it makes sense. So I’m trying to figure out how to deal with all of this in a detached and loving way, in a fair way. One of the pieces of advice I got was accepting it without taking blame that I didn’t deserve (also my wheelhouse with these people, because that’s part of the codependent deal you sign up for with them). Just sitting with the knowledge that maybe I wasn’t wrong. That it wasn’t my fault. That it was about a lot of things for me (that I am attracted to these kinds of people for various reasons), but that this particular thing that I was accused of is actually true not about me. The advice was just to sit with that, try it on, see how it feels. My typical reaction when someone criticizes me is to a)feel defensive and b)assume they’re right and c)rush to change/make it right. Which would be the right thing to do if the criticism was valid. But I’m not sure it is. So I am sitting with the idea that I am okay as I am. Which is pretty radical for me. Which means Danielle LaPorte’s post is very timely indeed.
