Several years ago I had a rough several months friend-wise. I lost a couple of my dearest friends all at once, though for very different reasons. I had made a promise to myself several years before even that – that when someone chose to give up on me without a fight, that I in turn would not fight to keep them. I stuck with that promise then and there are days that I deeply regret it.
But lately I have been thinking that there have been, perhaps, more subtle repercussions to those events then just the periodic twinge of regret I was familiar with. Building new friendships has been hard and I have found myself reluctant to fully commit to new people. Often I feel myself emotionally recoiling from that vulnerability as I would physically from an open flame. When I get the slightest sense that I may have allowed someone to become more important to me than I am to them, I immediately withdraw and work to pull apart those connections in my heart.
What I have been realizing is that… well… this sounds ridiculous but I think I have made myself even harder to love. I have no delusions about being easy to love – I am moody often bordering on morbid, a natural recluse with too much interest in books and a somewhat prudish sense of humor. I can be demanding of others and yet personally lazy and there are days I think Colin must have the patience of a saint not to throw his hands up and walk away.
Add on top of that an inability to trust my own value to
others and you have what I can completely understand as a truly obnoxious
combo.
And really, that is what is a new realization to me – that underneath
the regret and the disappointment over the broken relationships and sad memories
is a deep current of distrust. If I was
so easy to discard by people who had known me for years… how can I hope to
build up anything new that won’t prove to be just as flimsy?
But then – when asking myself that question, I realized the
hypocrisy in it, because those same people could feel the same way about my
actions – because I let them go. When
given the opportunity to defend myself and fight for my friends, I gave in to
pride, raised my chin and said ‘if we were truly friends, I wouldn’t have to
prove myself to you.’
But isn’t that what friendship is, in the end? Proving yourself? Showing another person that you deserve that
piece of themselves they chose to entrust to you? And that you’ll take the stripes that
inevitably come when people aren’t perfect and they wound you, but as a friend,
you love them through it? If that is a
test of friendship, then I am the one who failed it.
And if I am harder to love as a result, it is my own fault.
I can't help but feel frustrated with myself for taking so long to see this. I have long understood what pulling inward and pushing away has cost me - but I called it self-preservation and accepted it as a result of the pain inflicted upon me by someone else. Never once did I stop to question whether I might have caused it myself.
All of this winds around and back into something I have been contemplating for months. Forgiveness. I desperately want to be better at forgiveness. In speaking with a friend last fall just a few short weeks after she lost her father unexpectedly, I realized again how short life is and how quickly it can slip through our fingers. And bitterness, anger, frustration, resentment - are they really how I want to be remembered?
But forgiveness is hard when you cannot see what you yourself need to be forgiven for. Does that make sense? Until I can see myself as someone who NEEDS to be forgiven, I can not hope to be able to truly forgive someone else. When I focus only on that I stand in a position to forgive someone else, I think that I am better. That I have the ability to choose to forgive. But I need to break myself down to understand that I stand where they stand - that I also need to be forgiven and someone else stands in that same position relative to me - the position to choose.
If I were to come to the end of my journey today, and would have to trust someone else to tell Grady someday who I was and what I was like - I would want them to say good things. I would want them to focus on whatever good there is in me and leave out all the rest. But I have to inspire that - I have to be the good things I would want him to hear, have to BE that with all that I am, with all that I do. And that begins, I think, with understanding that I am not those things. That I am, in fact, the opposite of a lot of those things.
And I ask you to forgive me.
And I promise to try to deserve it.
