It Saddens Me

It saddens me that when I draw boundaries with people, when they have explicitly and clearly crossed the line, there is instant attitude and defensiveness. I understand that because I have not been consistent in my messages in the past, that I am responsible for how people treat me and I am working through that, but it still makes me sad.

Sad that I should bare the brunt their anger because I stood up for myself. That I then become the outcast, the scapegoat, the "bad guy", no longer a "true-friend."

Saddens me even more that I've always know that might be the case if I were to ever put my foot down and what does that say about the friendship in the first place?

Mostly, what's probably the saddest of all...is that I just don't care all that much. It's not keeping me up at night knowing that they are angry at me or that I might not be a part of their lives any more. I love these people, but I can no longer find the room in my spirit to allow them to treat me poorly and take advantage of me and when I expressed this through my actions and directly verbally, the friendship became unstable.

This is the very sort of social drama I am working to disengage from. I simply don't have the energy, not to mention that it is not conducive to healthy friendships or healthy people within those respective friendships.

I'm just sort of done with it. If this means that I at some point am down to a very small, select few group with whom I interact on only rare occasions, so be it. I am sort of ready for that in many ways as I can clearly see how I've allowed myself to be distracted by many and the quality of those distractions was low to moderate at best.

I am shifting again, I feel it. Growing, becoming my "self." I did this at about 24 or 25. It was an intensely spiritual journey in many ways and I find the seeds of such in my heart at the moment. I made choices in friendships during that time too...housecleaning if you will. It gets easier with age I am finding, maybe because I feel more secure in myself and the life I am creating, or maybe I just don't have the same needs.

The bottom line is this, there are some people in your life that will be an indefinite figure in your life, I can name a few and I feel incredibly lucky that I can do that. The rest, come and go and that's ok too, but one thing I have learned in these past several years is how to establish a level of mutual respect within your relationships from the get go, otherwise the relationship simply cannot exist.

It's just hard for me to see people treat each other this way, to be petty and catty and disrespectful of one another. This life is just too short to waste it on such trivial things.