It seems that this season, this summer-into-fall, has brought its theme into full focus for me this year. Fall, the time of harvest. And the idea of harvest is one of reaping benefits; of bounty. Yet, there is another idea we humans have exchanged at times less optimistic: we reap what we sow.
I am undecided in this moment. Undecided as to whether I am reaping, or harvesting. Reaping seems more like a cutting out. Harvesting, to me, suggests enjoyment of an effort well made. A celebration of culmination. In the moment I finish this writing, I feel more that I am cutting some things away. But, perhaps not the things that I think.
I've lost people from my life this year. They still walk and talk and breathe, just not in my life. Do I understand that people come and go? Yes. And, some of them, I have chosen to lose. Intellectually, it took me quite some time to understand that just because I was putting energy into a friendship didn't mean the friend would recognize this, and match my energy. And it's odd, really, that it took me as long as it did to learn this simple fact. I'd almost call it a selective blind spot. The facts have confronted me over and over, and yet, I repeated the process with friends over the years.
In moments of reflection, I think I keep concluding that it's because I'm an eternal optimist. An odd combination, perhaps, such a cynic (as I am, for sure!) and yet an optimist as well.
But, the losses this season seem compounded. There's a term I hear in my head when I think about the act of making the choice to do so much damage to a relationship that there is no hope of ever going back. The term is, "burning it down." The relationship ceases to be anything but ashes. What you once saw in all of its glory is simply gone, and in its place only thin air.
One friend, who has been a friend for decades, off-handedly let slip some details relating to a very difficult time in my life. On deeper questioning, I eventually discovered that some of the actual premises of the foundation of our friendship were lies. I left it there. I couldn't fathom a relationship with somebody who lies and continues to lie when the truth would be so simple to offer.
Only a month or two later, a friend burned our friendship to the ground, and I felt .... robbed. I felt ripped off of any chance to express the pain the friend had caused me, and to issue a statement of how I had been wronged by that friend, as my friend claimed I had done.
But as I consider the reasons that I held my tongue, I recognize that I was again acting as the optimist, almost saying to my friend, "here's how hard I'm going to work to keep our friendship, and I will keep my pain and my frustration to myself and let you keep treating me like your personal punching bag." No, the friend was not physical with me. It's a metaphor (of course) for the pain each time she got angry and lashed out at the nearest person. Each thing that she knew about me only because I trusted her enough to let her know these things... Each of those things, she tore to shreds.
Never mind that my friend had taken freely of my generosity; never mind that my integrity with people, and most of all with friends and loved ones, is primary to me; never mind that my friend was in a period of extreme upset and anxiety and a full-on melt down, emotionally.
In the "burn down letter" I received, the friend proceeded to tear me down in every way possible. There was criticism for my struggles with my spouse, and criticism for how I express myself, and there was blame that was pushed off on me that--in all fairness--should have readily been shared.
There was even off-handed trivialization of my generosity, and of things I've freely given, which was, itself, a sad thing to hear and read. Most of all, what I really got as I read and re-read the letter was that the things I hadn't been saying to my friend were coming back to haunt me. What I believed the friendship to have been had vanished into thin air. It was a ghost of what I had believed it to be.
Believing that I was acting compassionately, I refrained from sitting my friend down and sharing how I'd felt frustrations or pain at her hands. My friend had been so "triggered" in the preceding five weeks or so that I had held my tongue, afraid that she was too fragile to even hear my pain, or concerns, or things she might perceive as criticisms. I'd watched her deny her own, clearly deep, deep pain (around things not related to me), and felt powerless because she would not have accepted my desire to help or share what I was observing. And, by holding my tongue, I set myself up as a perfectly safe place for my friend to dump all of her emotional garbage.
Sadly, my friend ripped away two other friends along with her own friendship. We had become friends with her long-time friend and the friend's boyfriend, and now, they are forced to choose between us. Not forced by us, but, by the actions of the first friend. We are simply standing by, watching as it unfolds in front of us. As I recognize that I'm not the chosen friend, I recognize also that I make things easy for people sometimes. I'm probably too forgiving, too much of a "safe space."
While I do know these things now, I doubt I'll change much, because its who I am. That same trait has been why I've been trusted by clients and been a leader in areas in my life. Another friend and I were having a beer the other night, and we were talking about the events over the end-months of the summer. She said, "When people start to barf all their own pain and baggage and garbage all over you, you know it. Just keep remembering that it's THEIR stuff, not yours." I laughed and cried at the same time. As inelegant as it sounds, that's very much what happened. I know when people choose me as their scapegoat, though they quite frequently don't seem to think I know. In a weird way, its a compliment. They recognize me as the strong one.
Friends, like the one who shared a beer with me, remind me that some do stay. Some tell the truth; some are strong enough to accept my human-ness and my flaws, and to reveal theirs to me, and are strong enough to be ok with those things. Others come for a short while, and share some laughs; some even convince me that they are sisters, and then, a moment turns the gold to lead, and they are gone.
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