Girl Shakes World

I have been doing some very heavy thinking over the last few days.

It would be evident from the last post that this was bound to happen, and it’s a good thing that this prompted me to do some thinking in order to sort things out in my own head.  My thinking is not going to benefit anyone else, as  1) I doubt very much that anyone has anything invested in the outcome of my thinking and 2) no one who was involved will be reading this anymore, but it has given me a chance to establish exactly what went wrong, why and how I can fix it.  It’s fine to make mistakes, but only if you learn from them; every one upsets people, lets people down, makes a fool of themselves, has a bad night/day/year or does things they immensely regret.  It happens.   Its part of life, and once it’s done, there is nothing you can do to change the fact that it happened.  But what separates people is that some put it down to “oh well, I’m sure I will redeem myself eventually”, and carry on hoping that everyone will forget about it. Others sit down and think about it, and solve the problem so that they don’t have to keep redeeming themselves.  I chose to do the latter.  If I pretended that nothing ever happened, everything was fine or that it wasn’t really my fault, what would I be achieving?  Absolutely nothing, other than making everyone feel justified in putting me in that box forever.

In my last post I did little more than give a brief of what went down, and admitted that I was at fault for some reason or another.  This in itself does nothing, other than make people aware of my weaknesses.  It is a step, but it is not a conclusion as far as I’m concerned.

What exactly was it that prompted my horrid behaviour to begin with?  Sure it was over indulgence, and sure I (sadly) don’t even remember doing most of the things I did, but that is not what started it, that is what brought it all out.  In a really extreme way, but all the same.  As for where it all started, I’m not even sure where to begin.

I know, or should know by now, that over indulging when I have issues is never a good idea.  A majority of the time, at least nine out of ten, I have a handle on my behaviour.  Sure I do silly things, but silly in a way that we will laugh about it in the morning.  I know my limits and am the first to put my hand up when I think they have been reached or crossed.  When I have issues, my awareness of my limits goes out the window.  I become that girl you get embarrassed for.  And those issues come out in spades.  It’s a tragedy from the get go.

The funny thing is, I went out with the intention of having a slow night.  I was going to have fun, sure, but I wasn’t going to have a big night.  I had resigned myself to that idea.  I knew that I wanted to get a feel for the situation before I had a big night within the situation.  And that brings me to the beginning.

Over the past few weeks I had been having worries about my friendship.  I even brought this to the fore during my blog week.  The phone calls had died off, as had the messages.  The invites had ceased.  I had started to feel like I wasn’t welcome to call whenever I had something awesome to share, and that he wasn’t really interested in the idea of seeing me.  This wasn’t really the case I’m sure, but my mind was in a bad place as it was, so I was over reacting to everything, including this.  He started up a new friendship around the same time so, somehow, my mind had joined the two events together.  Not because of her specifically, but because she was the one getting the phone calls and invites and what have you.  Yes, jealousy.  She was the kind of person I just wasn’t, and rather than realising he liked us both for different reasons, I thought that he had ‘grown out of me’ because I wasn’t that person.  This was different to the other friends I had met, even when he was close to them, simply because even though he grew close to them, my relationship with him didn’t change because of it.  He became close with both (or all) of us.  In this case, it felt like the more his relationship with her strengthened, the more distant ours became.

Now, had I met up with them in a different situation I would have realised the error of my thoughts.  Isolation had meant I was making everything worse than it was.  The silly thing is that I KNEW this.  And up until a certain point in the night, I was getting over it.  Had I just stuck to the plan, everything would have been fine.  But no.  I got to a point where every thought I had been having came pouring out.

Now, I was going on about being “number one”, but that is not what I really meant.  Those were just the words I apparently found.  I know that there are no numbers, no ranking system.  As I said, even before it had not worried me him becoming close with other people because my relationship with him never changed; I didn’t consider myself “number one”, I just was what I was and they were what they were.  The same with him and my friends.  They were separate and different and not interchangeable, which is true.  In this case, I felt like I was being compared to her, for all the reasons I have mentioned.  I believe that what I was trying to say, very badly, was that I was scared she had taken my place.  That she was now his grace, his best friend, and that I was just a tag along.  My relationship with him was very important to me, and it didn’t bother me that they were getting close, I just didn’t want that to mean I was being pushed away.  Since I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly, it came out very differently.  To be honest, I don’t remember the exact conversation; all I can say is what I know was going on in my head.  I still don’t think there is some kind of ranking system, nor did I at the time.  It is like when I came back after years of being away and I was unsure of what our relationship would be like when I got back, only this time I felt like I was being compared to someone.

So, in the end, my problem is this: I didn’t deal with my issues when I should have.  Rather than asking why things had changed because I didn’t want to seem too needy in my isolated state, I assumed and made myself too needy.  I cared too much of what my best friend thought of me, instead of accepting that he already knows my flaws, and ended up making him think badly of me and added new flaws to his image of me.  You see, that has always been my issue.  I have always felt like he was too good for me, and that I was replaceable to him.  So this is what I need to deal with.  I need to learn that my friends know me, and that they know when something is up; instead of trying to hide it from them in the hopes that that will make me seem like a better friend, I need to just face up to things.  I am not someone else, and I will never be.  And that is ok; if they are going to be my friend, they will despite my flaws and because of the fact that I am not like someone else.   I don’t need to fight for something I already have.  Or in this case, I guess, already had.

The person involved said that I have done this more than once, in different ways.  I’m sure that for him to say that it must be true; I am not disputing that it must be the way I have come across at more than one point in time for him to think that.  To me, I have never reacted with jealousy in that way before, not with him.  Sure, I have disliked some of his friends.  Sure, I have pointed out things that I thought were issues, which he may not have agreed with.  And sure, I may have reacted to people in a certain way because of complaints he made about them even when he was only venting…but all of those things were spurred either by a personal feeling towards a person with no influence from him, or out of pure concern/care/etc for him. But I still played nice if he chose to be friends with those people.   It may have come across as jealousy, but it wasn’t, not really.  Though, admittedly there has been times where I have double checked he was not ‘replacing’ me, but that was more out of distance – where I wanted to know the status of our friendship i.e. whether or not he had grown past it after being separated for long periods.  I mean, honestly, it happens, especially through distance.  He also said that the care, etc that he gives to me I do not give back.  On this occasion, that is fair, but in general I don’t believe that to be a fair statement.  He obviously disagrees, but I still beg to differ. (I would like to point out at this point that I am not saying this to deliberately disagree with him or any reason other than those are the only statements he made that I do not believe to be entirely fair.  Again, he may disagree and that is fine).

And don’t worry, this will be my last post on the subject.  I just needed to get it out.