Recently, I lost a good friend.
But today I won’t tell the story of how that happened, or explain why I’m right and they were wrong, or even put together a motivational manifesto arguing why solitude is the unspoken advantage of the strong, and therefore why I’m better off without this person.
I’m a psychologist, and I like analysing situations to the brim. Turning them over on all sides, identifying and dissecting every little detail that could potentially help me paint a comprehensive big picture. Aside from that, I also have a guilty pleasure for calling BS out and speaking the truth, even and especially when it makes everybody in the room too uncomfortable to partake. If we don’t accept the truth, how can we expect ourselves to grow?
So this is exactly what I am going to do today. Look at toxicity, losing friends and what all these shenanigans mean. And hopefully speak to your heart about similar stories you’ve gone through yourself.
Probably the worst thing about losing friends is feeling as though we’re unwanted. Rejected, unpleasant, not worth the trust or the energy or the time. When someone leaves, our worst insecurities and fears are being confirmed, and our self-esteem – frail at times as one does – takes a considerably sized knockdown. I’m not cool enough or I’m not fun enough or this person feels like investing in our relationship is a waste. And that is absolutely normal: we, as humans, are social creatures and harbour a discreet need to be accepted and appreciated. Nobody wants to admit to it in 2019, but we all secretly desire to be liked by others.
So when we’re not liked by others, we feel hurt. And when somebody that once liked us doesn’t like us anymore, we feel that we failed them. Something’s obviously changed about me that made them leave, am I really growing to be a bad person? When our friendships change, it’s often because our life changes or the other person’s life changes, or everybody’s lives change and we no longer have a designated space for the people that once used to mean the world to us. And if we might take rejection with a fair amount of acceptance and closure, it is very hard to not feel awful when we realise our changing for the worse made our friend leave.
And this is why friends that leave because ‘you changed’ are utterly fake.
As a living, breathing, feeling human being, you are destined to continuously go through changes. Good and bad ones, regardless, they are all responses to the stuff that’s happening to you, the obstacles you face and the lessons you learn along the way. In no manner, shape or form would you be able to stay the same person you were one year ago, one month ago or even last week. And whoever expects that from you either has to learn a thing or two about life, or is consciously a very bad friend.
Sometimes the changes we go through are negative indeed. Sometimes we pick up bad habits or we do careless gestures that hurt others or we hurt ourselves – but when such negative changes occur, a real friend would rather help us out, provide us with support and a shoulder to cry on and a hand to hold along the way back to ourselves, rather than leave. And the friends that leave when you’re not feeling great, those you simply don’t want in your life to begin with.
But what about positive changes? What if we overcame our personal struggles, got that promotion that we strove towards forever, started a new and fulfilling relationship or were lucky enough to get the last slice of pizza? Fake friends sometimes leave when and because things are going swell for us. No matter how hard it will seem to believe, the end of a friendship here has nothing to do with us or what we achieved or how success prompted us to change. Sometimes, people decide to make friends with us because they feel they overpower us – and as long as we stay at the same level of personal and professional success, we won’t pose a threat to their status of self-esteem. And when we do become a threat, they are quick to eliminate us completely. Is it sad? Of course, it’s heartbreaking. But do we want to hang around people unwilling to celebrate how well we do? Not in a billion years.
Last but not least, we have toxicity. Our friends will sometimes be hurt by the gestures we make or our general approach to the circumstances that test our relationships. Our flaws will make them feel bad, one way or another, and they arrive to a point where they’ve had enough.
My personal feelings around toxicity are wildly mixed. On one hand, I’m all about not taking any crap from anybody, from anyone in the world – life is too short and sweet to waste on a-holes. On the other hand, I’m very much aware of how complex human nature can be and of how people are and will always be more than just one thing: sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, friends, colleagues, lovers, artists, students, workers, dreamers and skeptics. Hard-working and passionate, but impatient and messy. Of various shades of both good and bad. I strongly believe that, often, people will rush to terminate friendships in which they have encountered a couple of the flaws that the person in question had. And those two flaws were enough for them to ignore all the good in their friend and decide they no longer want them in their life.
If you were at any point accused of being a toxic friend, take it with a pinch of salt. Maybe you haven’t always done well by that person, but that doesn’t mean you should ever put yourself down for being a flawed human being, literally the only type of human being to ever exist. You are a person, you make and will make mistakes for the rest of your life. As for the people that we push away, their gestures say more about themselves and how toxic they can actually be, than about us.
With this post, I guess I wanted to make a few points I thought to be important – all whilst healthily expressing the anger I’ve accumulated the past few weeks. Add the fatigue, because I’m so damn tired of losing friends. You can bet I’m happy I’m losing the fake ones, though. To more fake friends being lost!
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