New Friend / Loss / Lessons in Days of My Destiny
- April 11, 2018, 4:30 a.m.
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- Public
I’m not sure if this entry is coherent or if I’m just rambling. Either way, I’m expressing what’s in my heart lately
I am grateful for my establishing friendship with Ryan. I met him 2 years ago, and then last June there were some shitty things going on that kind of interrupted the beginning of our friendship. It feels like it’s kicking off again, which is absolutely perfect timing for me, given that I am drawing the friendship with T to a slow end.
I feel like the season with T is over, and maybe Ryan will be in my life for another season. For now, we can show up and just be, and share all the shittiness about ourselves and all our dirty washing and everything we’re learning through it all. When the friendship was first interrupted, it was because of some shitty things he had done that had nothing to do with me that I found out about and it triggered some things for me. I pretty much had to confront him about it or else it was really going to effect how we worked together, which, when you work with kids, there’s more at stake and your working relationships with other staff really need to be workable. Confronting him was horrible and we were both crying and so on.... so we kind of saw some yucky parts about ourselves early on, which caused the interruption to the flourishing of the friendship.... but somehow through it all, I stayed in his life, messaging him and checking in on him every few weeks. Maybe the fact that I’d done some shitty things in the past and had grown from them is why I stuck around… I cared about him deeply, without knowing if it was reciprocated. Sometimes I thought maybe I was that annoying person that just wouldn’t go away… but I just couldn’t go away. And then at the end of last year, he gave me a Christmas Card that expressed how thankful he was that I had stuck around. Because ever since, he’s been on a journey of self-development and learning and bettering and accepting and being kind to himself. Which is the kind of journey I’ve been on for almost 10 years now, with a few new experiences and lessons thrown in the mix of late.
So I hung out with him yesterday. We went to an art gallery and observed and philosophised on all random things. Then we left and walked and talked and walked and talked, pretty much for the rest of the time, except for when we sat down on the grassy patch near the river to eat a kebab and interact with a baby that was crawling towards us and being super cute. All up we hung out together for about 4 and a half hours and at the end, I honestly didn’t feel ready to leave yet but I was so tired and we both had long drives home. He actually lives on an island at the moment but is visiting the main land.
I told him about the passing of an old friend of mine. I found out on Friday that this friend died after having a motorbike accident about a month ago. He’d broken his hip and while that was recovering, he’d developed a horrible cough that the doctors couldn’t figure out… and then on Thursday he had a massive coughing fit that was so bad he couldn’t breathe… until he couldn’t breathe anymore.................... my grieving of his death really took me by surprise at first, because we weren’t that close, and there was a sizeable age gap between us. I was actually friends with him and three of his cousins but I was closer in age and friendship to his cousins. But the thing is...... at the age of 15, I held a knife to my throat one day when I’d really really had enough of everything, looking at myself in the mirror, and had started pressing it against my neck. It hurt pretty bad and I chickened out and decided I’d do it the following week, for sure. And then that following week, I met them.They just sprang into my life, full of love and passion and enthusiasm, and they saved me.
So grieving his death isn’t that surprising, given the strong impact he and his cousins had on my life.
And I shared this with Ryan, and he listened, as he did with all my other stuff going on at the moment, with self-development and so on, and he shared his stuff with me.
The best part about all of this is that L and I are at a point in our marriage again where we both feel completely comfortable with me having a male friend, and so does he, and there is nothing to hide because it actually is a friendship.
The timing of everything is amazing.
With regards to self-development.... I really didn’t expect this journey this year at all. I was expecting to change the logistics of my life to make it more peaceful and free. But things just keep coming up. And I’m learning to sit with the discomfort and sadness and pain.
My whole life, my motto was “Happiness is my destiny.” But I didn’t realise that in chasing that destiny, I was undermining and sabotaging all my other emotions. Because deep down, without realising, I guess I believed that happiness equals the absence of problems. That’s because in my childhood and living-at-home years, it wasn’t ever safe to be with all those emotions. My parents could have them and express them and lose their shit, but us kids did not have that right. My job specifically (self-imposed) was to keep my younger siblings safe, and to show them the beauty of the world no matter what was bursting around us. That’s where my silver-linings ideology began. And I subconsciously decided in my late teens and early 20’s that happiness equals the absence of problems, and I began to work towards achieving that. And for a time I did achieve that… but what I’m learning lately is that actually, happiness does not equal the absence of problems but rather choosing which problems you want to engage with. And I’m also learning that happiness also equals sitting with the discomfort and sadness and pain in life, without the meta-analysis or the judgement and self-criticism. I’m learning to just let it be. And I honestly couldn’t be learning this at a better time, given that I am grieving the loss of my old friend who helped save me, as well as the loss of T.
I can grieve and know that it is okay to do so. It is safe for me in my life now to feel like my heart is beating outside of my body, stripped and bleeding and vulnerable to the elements.
And I can simultaneously make a new friend and that is okay, too.
I can experience pain and joy concurrently. And all of this is okay. Even necessary.
Last updated April 11, 2018
Gangleri ⋅ April 11, 2018