Mundane Monday

I will try to return to my more “succinct” posting style with this one – please bear with my “bombastic loquaciousness” when it pops up! At any rate, sticking with the “alliteration,” I thought I would write about a topic that has been on my mind quite a bit recently – it is something of a “problem” that has affected me throughout my life and so has become something of a “bore,” thus the title, “Mundane Monday.”

When I was in middle school, there was a series of events which really had nothing to do with me and as a result, my “best friend” at the time and the vast majority of my “group of friends” basically just stopped talking to me one day and made it something of a “life mission” to make my life a living Hell. This continued well through high school – it was actually one of the main reasons I decided to graduate a year early – but it started at that already oh-so-pleasant age of around 12-13. One day I had a group of friends, most of whom were in all of my classes, and the next day, I was “Public Enemy No. 1.” Stories were made up about me throwing backpacks in front of some of these people so they would trip walking up the aisle in a classroom (if you had any idea how shy and absolutely rule-abiding I was in “grade school,” you would know I WOULD NEVER EVEN THINK OF DOING SUCH A THING FOR FEAR OF GETTING IN TROUBLE AND DRAWING THE ATTENTION OF OTHERS!); on my birthday, I was greeted in the cafeteria by others coming up to me and saying “Happy Birthday, BITCH!” and then running to the former “friends” where they all laughed and laughed and laughed. As time went on, the “main character” in all of this went to extremes by “stealing away” my new best friends one by one; she would act like my friend’s best friend evAR, inviting her to do things all the time, &c., until said “friend” was hanging out with this former group of “friends.” This happened to me with AT LEAST 4-5 best friends – NEW friends I had made in the process of just trying to survive those adolescent and teenage years. It got to the point where I very literally hit the blackest black of my life – that discussion is for another time, I promise (it’s an important one).

As a result of these ongoing experiences, I developed something of a “PTSD” when it came to TRUSTING people and trusting friends, in particular. I did end up making new friends at the end of junior high (maybe in 8th or 9th grade) – and although these people were also somewhat “taken away” by these other malevolent people, I did manage to convince the “new” friends just to be careful with these “others” and I explained all the horrible things that had been done to me (high school was ridiculous in terms of the bullying in that regard – that’s another long story too!). As time has gone on long past high school, I have lost most of these friends largely due “to” chronic illness (and a variety of other factors), but the feeling and the fear remains. I am something of a paradox in this regard (I think most people have opposing sides to themselves … but I also think most people don’t take the time to identify and acknowledge this opposition of sorts); I am very open with people including those I have just met; but I do keep a lot of myself very close to myself in order not to be hurt like I was innumerable times earlier in my life.

Fast forward to the present. I have found myself in something of a similar “predicament.” I would not “cut off” friends I have made because they have befriended someone else like I did when I was much younger, but the contemplation of the hurt that could await me in the future and the potential to lose incredibly kind and good friends are things that haunt my mind. One thing I have learned over time is that no matter what you do you cannot change people or influence them to do things they wouldn’t do themselves. You can try and perhaps you will succeed by coincidence, but most of the time you will feel like you are hitting your head against a wall. I suppose all I can say for now is that I hope my friends start to put 2 and 2 together, start to see things “logically,” start to realize that the story they are being told doesn’t match up with reality. I cannot force even such truths on anyone. It has been very difficult for me to deal with this issue – I do believe I have, as I mentioned before, something like PTSD regarding this kind of “abandonment” scenario. However, despite the banality of it all and my reactive desire just to drop it all and not even have to think about any of it, I have been trying to “respond” to this situation rather than “react” as I normally would (it would be something like just feeling sick and tired of dealing with the same bs from people and just dropping those who can’t see the forest, so-to-speak). I am utilizing a “new technique” I have conjured in order to deal with this situation – I don’t want to say too much, but it is essentially turning things right back around on the person in question. Only time will tell how that goes, and only time will tell if my new friends (for whom I have been so grateful) can see how nothing will actually change over time and that I am always just who I am – if I say I am there, honey bunny, I am THERE. *NOTE: My apologies for the esoteric nature of this “description;” I really don’t want to give out too many details regarding all of this just for a variety of personal reasons.*

At any rate, that is the “mundane” issue with which I am dealing this Monday! Things are pretty good overall right now, so I think I will just appreciate what I have and wait for time to do its thing, praying all the while that the passage of time and what it brings (or fails to bring!) are things that are realized and understood by the “others” in question right now. I have fought so many battles in my life and I have so many PTSD-like issues that are easily triggered as a result of these battles. There are many lessons in all of this, namely that ONE CAN ONLY DO SO MUCH and that YOU CAN NEVER CHANGE ANOTHER PERSON.

I hope you are all having a happy and healthy day wherever you are in the world! It is bloody HOT here today – about 90 degrees F! Happy FIRST DAY OF FALL, at any rate! Thank you for taking the time to read this and I would sincerely love to hear YOUR stories of friendship and betrayal and how you have learned either to live with the issue or rectify it in some way. I hope to be back a little later on – I have so much in my head that needs to get out! I hope you all have a wonderful fall/autumn and REMEMBER – my heart is ALWAYS with YOU….

❤ Always, Beth