Today we got fired and I honestly don’t know if this is a loss or a gain. We have given it our all, but in the end the client chose to let us go. And this client happened to be our friend. So now I’m sitting here, pondering about friendship and what this entails for me.
I feel like a veil has lifted and yet again I am delivered with a lesson that I should have already learnt. Fortunately for me I have become a positive person and I still believe that out of this situation only good will come. One good thing that has already come is that I now have more time for my writing. But where to begin?
Ever since I was a young girl I have attracted ‘friends’ that manipulated or exploited me.
The first time I noticed that this was a pattern I was around thirty years of age. By then I had dragged false friendships along for years and years.
My first fake friendship was a friend who I used to hang out with on a daily basis. We were living just one street apart from each other and it was an effortless friendship with lots of laughter. Suddenly things started to disappear from our household. We were missing watches, shoes, jeans and all sorts of clothing. My mom and my sister blamed me for it but I had no idea what happened to our things.
Until one day I needed to pick up a borrowed item from my friend. I called her house phone (yes, it was a long time ago) and her mother picked up. She said that my friend wasn’t at the house but I could come by and pick it up anyway. So I went there with a friend and when I opened my friend’s closet all our family belongings were hidden behind the stacks of clothes in her closet.
In a state of complete shock I could only feel the hurt. It was my friend who said that we were packing it all and bringing it back to my house. I felt so much shame towards my mother and sister as it concerned their belongings too and I remember coming back shaking and crying my eyes out. I could not believe this was my friend who stole from us, from our home, our safe space.
Little did I know that I would carry this lesson forward for many more years to come.
The friend that was with me during this memory turned out to be no different. This so called friend has been in my life since the start of puberty. Looking back I saw that she always had a hidden agenda, one to keep me dependent of her. The stunts she pulled me included a strong will to ‘share’ drugs with me and in the end she even deliberately underpaid me at a job she ‘gave’ me. This relationship held on for many years, almost two decades. She always (unconsciously) wanted to control me, wanted to keep me close as a best friend.
I was naïve in my friendships, chose to look only at the joyous moments or maybe I was lacking the awareness and energy to do something about it. So I left these relationships lingering, thinking these were close friends. By the time I was thirty one years old I encountered my point of no return. I started really looking into my choices and whether or not they were promoting happiness. Only then I realised that it was a distorted friendship, an unwilling dependency from my end.
I decided to cut all the cords and end our so called friendship. It was very confusing as there were so many happy memories involved, but I chose me because I knew it was not a healthy situation. I vowed to become more aware of these types of people, but it turns out, they’re everywhere. And people like me are everywhere too.
And so this symbiosis of unhealthy friendships continued even though I tried to be more aware.
Every once in a while I welcomed another manipulator and even though I have gotten quicker and better at releasing these relationships, I notice that every single manipulator gets me down. Every time a veil lifts I notice that I could have seen and known it at an earlier stage. I drag relationships along for much longer than is necessary.
As I’m writing this I still need to evaluate this supposed friendship that has let me down so much and thus it is too early for me to write about it. Memories are still popping up in my mind, now seen from another angle. And I am thinking why did I give so much? Why did I not listen to my intuition?
The answer is quite clear; Because I moved from fear. Usually the beginning of these types of friendship start with me feeling uncertain. I have been in an uncertain situation for years now and I guess there are times when you hope that other people will fix it for you. Whether it is an unconscious thought or not, it leads me back to ‘the Gap’, a story that I have written before.
When I meet these people there is a sense of looking up to them. The relationship is not equal due to the fact that I place these people on a pedestal. As I have explained earlier, it creates a gap for manipulation and abuse and as you can see, I have created this gap myself. I have only me to blame and the only thing I can do now is pick up my shit (my emotions, thoughts and self-pity) and move ahead.
The funny thing is that I change up my affirmations from time to time. I add affirmations whenever one feels safe for me and one that I added to my repertoire recently is: “If it’s mine make it flow, if it’s not make it fall away fast”. And it did, fall away fast. And here I am, in a state of confusion, uncertainty and doubt.
So there you have it, healing is a journey and it never ends. The more you think you understand your lessons, the greater the confusion.
Is this the universe telling me that I need to stay on track? I am still reviewing what happened and many truths still need to land but at least I gained more experience to start off from. And what does my experience tell me?
It tells me that the only way is forward. That all things happen for a reason and if I want to find out what this reason is, I need to motor on. I can’t tell you why this pattern has haunted me for so long and what I did to deserve this. All I can say is that bad things happen to people all around the world on a daily basis. And I am no exception. So what will I do? I will leave it lingering for a few days, have all the memories pop back up. I will create a story in my mind that makes this memory bearable for me and then I will let go and move on.
There is a fair chance that I will encounter another manipulator in the foreseen future but this time I will try to not move from fear. I will trust in my own abilities and have faith that things are always working out for me. Just like the waves of an ocean I will ride out this flow, because I know that this has happened to me for a reason and I am capable of overcoming this.
A flower doesn’t worry all day whether or not it is going to bloom and how it is going to bloom. It just trusts the flow of life. And so will I. Things will get better and I will move ahead with certainty because I know that I can endure these things and so can you.
“Sometimes the grass is greener, because it’s fake.”
Unknown
