PERSONAL

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3,584

Seeing From Different Eyes

7 years ago2,337 words

I've been a mess recently... Or I suppose I've been a mess for a long while now, but these past few days have been worse. Some of the worst in my life. I feel like I've lost or will lose my best friend, because of my faults and mistakes, and as she's been the thread that's kept me hanging onto life for a while now, well...

I'm too dependent on this one friend. I tie my moods and happiness to hers. If I can spend time with her, I'm happy, and if I can't, I'm not. It shouldn't be this way, I know. But it's not as if I can just decide to be otherwise.

I know enough about psychology to understand why people become clingy and dependent; I'm sure I've written about this more than once before. Children whose needs were always met, whose loving parents or guardians were always there for them during their formative years, will probably be relatively secure; their minds have been programmed to think that resources are always going to come, so the thought of worrying that they won't doesn't even occur to them. In the less fortunate, however - children who've been neglected in some form or another, whose needs were met unreliably if at all - there's a drive to cling to resources when they arise because the alternative is to let them pass by and be left with nothing for who knows how long. Insecurity is a lack of security; a deeply-ingrained doubt that things will get better, or even that they won't get much worse.

As I grew up with my divorced, neglectful, alcoholic father and had to go many days without food, and as I've spent many years without relationships and never had much luck finding them at any point in my life, of course I'm going to cling to an appealing person who arrives in my life. That's such a rarity, after all, and if I don't, I'll lose that, and be back at square one, tormentingly alone again. Or at least that's what the mind 'thinks', unconsciously.

This kind of dependence gives rise to jealousy and neurotic insecurity. It's what tore apart my only romantic relationship, and I feel it's tearing apart this friendship in exactly the same way. It's tormenting not just because the fear of losing her and being cast back into the void is palpably painful, sickening, but because I hoped so much that I'd overcome and outgrown those adolescent thought patterns, that all I've learned about psychology and spirituality had rid me of the worst of my inner demons.

But I suppose we never truly change... At best we can subdue our demons, put them to sleep, but they're always there, and they can wake up... And you have to go through the whole frantic, stressful, exhausting dance of lulling them into slumber again; the cycle repeats.

Anyway, I'm not really saying much of worth here. I'll write a bit about what specifically has led to this point recently. I'm aware that my friend doesn't like her own thoughts and issues being known by a bunch of people she doesn't know, so I'll try to keep this focused on my own thought processes.

We both had interviews this week about going to the summer school for a few weeks in Korea. About thirty people are applying for ten slots, so it's quite competitive. It seems her interview went really well... but I don't think that mine did. I'm still cringing about it, going over and over what I wish I'd said instead. I even sent an email to one of the members of the panel about it, but I don't know if it would have helped. It might even have made things worse.

I want my friend to go and have an amazing time, to have an experience that will help her grow and enhance her life. But I already struggle with comparisons to her, as she lives with her partner and has other friends and just generally seems to have her life sorted out better than my own. If she goes on that trip and I don't, then I'll have to spend lonely weeks in summer probably doing nothing, alone, while she makes new friends and grows and I just... don't. I know I should just be happy for her, untainted by envy... But sadly minds don't work so naively idealistically. I don't know if I can bear the negative feelings that'll cause.

I suppose mostly it's a fear of losing her. Of her finding better people on that trip and no longer having any interest in someone like me. Of being back at square one, alone again; those same insecure fears of abandonment, conditioned over a life spent being abandoned.

So that's been - and still is - a big source of stress. I'll find out in a few days who's been chosen, but until then I suppose I'll be in a state of constant anxiety.

There's more than that, though. It seems a bunch of factors have built up that have led to my friend becoming sick of me, and the worst part is that I didn't even realise. Or rather, I suppose I knew something was up, but didn't know whether I was the cause (I always assume I'm not important enough to make an impact), or what specifically I'd done... Or perhaps it's more like I was pretending everything was okay because I didn't want it to be otherwise.

We're all guilty, I think, of expecting people to be mind readers. Of getting upset when people don't do what we want them to, even when we don't actually tell them what it is that we want them to do. I thought I didn't do this, that I was if anything too open about how I feel and what I want. But this might not be true.

I use an app to record my moods over time, a sort of diary thing, and I introduced my friend to it a while ago so now she uses it too. She showed me some of her posts from it the other day, things concerning me, and it was surprising, alarming, to see that her take on at least some things was different to what I thought. It made me think a lot about how two people can share an experience, which one thinks was an amazing episode of deep bonding, and which the other just felt was uncomfortably intrusive. "I want to stay like this forever" and "I want to get out of here right now", both from the same situation.

And no, I haven't abused her or anything like that if it sounds like I'm hinting at something so awful... though I have been wondering about extreme things like that. How it's easy to assume that all rapists are sadistic monsters, trapping sobbing, screaming women and violating them in full awareness of what they're doing, getting off on the thrill of inflicting harm as much as the act itself. But perhaps it's more commonly something much more subtle, insidious, with a man who genuinely believes he's pleasuring someone who cares about him, when she's screaming silently in her head, wanting to escape but making no move to do so. The rape, then, becomes a private, psychological experience born of what's essentially misunderstanding, a failure in open, genuine communication of honest feelings. No clear monster/victim roles; just two people with entirely different attitudes to a shared experience. Both feel awful afterwards. Confused about why the other would think like that.

Anyway, I say again that I haven't done anything like that! But there have been times when I thought she and I were bonding with words, that she was as happy to be with me, talking, as I was to be with her, though what I saw of her private thoughts suggests it wasn't that way at all.

I suppose it's easy as well to think that what gives us pleasure will give others pleasure too; to give what we want to receive and hope it'll be helpful to the other person as it would be for us. I'm reminded of people who'd criticise me online in the past, saying they'd love to hear such harsh critique because it'd help them grow... but of course I didn't, so it was entirely unwelcome. I love talking about feelings, and delight at the opportunity if it arises; I love being asked 'how are you?', having someone I care about pry into my mind to find out what's up. But some people find that smothering, intrusive, annoying; they feel they can cope with their emotions alone, and don't need someone barging in to 'help'.

I want to talk about all this with my friend, but I know that she needs time, so I'm keeping my distance for now. It's best not to just try and force things quickly; it only makes them worse. Some recovery period is necessary to get thoughts in order. But I'm anxious with impatience... I keep going over things I want to say, but have to hold them in until I get my chance to talk.

If I even get that chance. Perhaps not everyone deserves chances? Perhaps if someone's decided that we're toxic, a poison best expelled, there's no way we can truly change their thoughts and alter how they see us? Perhaps separation is the only option in cases like that? It's a scary thought, that things can be messed up and lost permanently...

I said I'm dependent on my friend, and I am... I feel she's the only thing I truly enjoy about my time here at university, like she's what matters here and all the work is just something in the background. I've also been thinking about suicide an awful lot, but thinking I need to be here for her is what convinces me not to do it. With her gone, what would hold me back?

Of course, I can't say that, since it's emotional blackmail, guilting. But then I think about that, too, and how people portray it as if people who say such things are doing so dishonestly, to manipulate. As if they say "I'll kill myself if you leave!", but then in their private world feel completely okay, like the words were just a lie used to control the other person. But it isn't like that. I imagine people who say things like that more often than not do so out of a place of torment; they genuinely believe that they won't survive without the other person, and only want to 'manipulate' in the sense that they honestly, genuinely fear losing what they believe they need to survive, and their mood makes it impossible to prevent that loss from happening in a healthier, more positive way.

I've been thinking a lot about how I've probably made my friend feel guilty more often than I should. I think we talked about it once, and I got the impression that she felt that I did this for its own sake; because her being guilty, her feeling bad, was some kind of end goal in itself, some cruel bullying I did just for the thrill of it. While there might be people like that in the world, I imagine it's usually nonsense. People do things because they want things. They don't guilt us to make us feel guilty. They want us to feel guilty in the hope we might give them something that they want or even need; it's a faulty, unhealthy approach to attempting to fulfill needs, not a venomous attack meant to hurt.

I might sulk and make her feel guilty about her being with other people not because I want her to feel bad about being with those people, but because I want her to spend time with me. It would be far, far better to make her want to spend time with me by being desirable, by inspiring an eager craving for my company, so then being with me was something to fulfill her needs and not mine. I wish I were better at that! But it really is difficult to operate against a lifetime's worth of psychological conditioning.

I suppose we all see other people in terms of how they affect us, though. We give little thought to their inner motivations compared to their effects on us; assume that what they've done to us was done for the sake of doing it to us, not because they were just trying to find a way to best organise the tangle of thoughts and desires in their own minds.

I pride myself on my understanding, my empathy... which is why it's alarming to know I'm not as great at either as I hoped I was. But seeing we've made mistakes opens the path to growth, I feel. We can learn from what we've done wrong in order to do better next time. For as long as the change sticks, anyway... Lessons keep needing to be relearned.

Lessons from spirituality seem relevant to all this... The idea that things are transient, that everything passes and changes, that there's no use clinging to anything because everything will be lost in time, that it's best to enjoy the moment while it lasts and be open to whatever the next moment might bring. That we should look within for peace, not depend on fleeting external objects. Easier said than done... though I did live according to these ideas once, and it was quite wonderful. I'd likely benefit from attempting to revive that outlook.

Anyway. There's much more I could say about all this, but I feel that writing this much about it has helped me a lot. There are other things I want to try, to meet new people and lessen my dependence on this one relationship... but they require waiting. I'll just have to hope the Korea thing turns out well...