Picking up from yesterday –
I can’t get passed the idea that if she just hadn’t called… if I’d just flown to California and gone to Legoland and seen my friends and whatever, that things would be different.
And somehow, sometimes, I put that way too much on her. A phone call and a request from her did not ruin my life, but it feels like such an inciting incident, I sometimes can’t seem to let it go, no matter how super crazy that is.
I held her to too high of a standard after that. I was coming to California for something many months later. And we had made plans to hang out, and have a sleepover and everything. And then at the last minute, she went on vacation with someone.
Really, in the grand scheme of life, was that that big of a slight?
We have been through everything together. We have seen so many ups and downs. We have made hospital visits, had long late-night phone calls… She’s shown up with a poster to a half marathon. We’ve experienced loss, and death, and also excitement, and change together. We have seen each other through SO much (great and awful), and I was so sure that we would be friends forever. (For real.)
So, is it that gigantic of a deal that she wanted to take a vacation with her new boyfriend instead of seeing her old friend? No. Is it friendship-ending? It shouldn’t be. But my brain cannot let go of “when you came to town last minute, I stayed and ‘got assaulted for you’. Now I come to town for something that’s been on our calendars for a while, you decide to not even be there?!”
And obviously I didn’t “get assaulted for her.” That’s crazy. I didn’t even get assaulted because of her.
But my Neanderthal brain can’t separate what happened from her being a part of the inciting incident. So, when she makes what would normally be a mildly hurtful misstep that should be preeetty easy to get past, now it feels like a friendship-ender. She was held to too gigantically high of a standard that no one could’ve ever survived forever, because I was too “angry,” I guess, or whatever with her, because of what just so happened to happen around her…
None of this is her fault, but I don’t know if our supposedly “rock solid” friendship (or so I thought) is gonna make it past this…
And even if I can grow up and have logical thoughts and get passed it, who knows if she’ll even still be around and willing and available to accept me back into her life then.
So, that’s something I’ve found exceptionally hard. It’s hard enough to deal with the relationships that I saw falling apart in front of my eyes, because of how I couldn’t even keep my own life together. So how on earth could I have ever have kept those together? That was hard enough.
But watching successful, thriving relationships just get hit by a meteor of my neurons, not being able to distinguish blame or whatever, that is really just a whole ‘nother level of exceptionally painful. And I never thought about the fact that I bet this happens with maybe a lot of people. Or not. Maybe people cope better than I do. Anyway, this just was a surprising sad jarring thing to me that I didn’t know was a thing, and now, I sadly do.
[This is from the sexual assault series.]