Confirmed - She is an Asshole!

There are times when you make a decision in the midst of a storm because you have no other choice at the moment.  Once the storm clears you look back and wonder if you made the right decision.  Sometimes, hindsight is 20/20 and you realize that you made a hasty decision, one that given another opportunity, you would make a different decision.  But then there are times when you are blessed with the opportunity to look back on a decision you made during a storm and be reassured you made the right choice.  That is what happened to me this morning and I couldn’t be more grateful; so much so that I had to share. 

One of my resolutions for the New Year was to not lose any friends this year.  I made that one of my resolutions because at the time, I was feeling like a choice I made to eliminate a friend from my life in 2011 was a good decision but one of those traumatic experiences that I just didn’t want to have to go through in 2012.  At the time, I was struggling with the idea that I was always the one who had to break up with friends.  At some point I had to be willing to acknowledge that there was something I was doing wrong because certain friendships had gone on past their shelf life. What I realize now, my error wasn’t in ending the friendships, it was in letting people stay in my life far longer than their actions indicated they should have. 

Sometimes when you have a longstanding friendship with a person, you ignore things about them.  Sometimes you make excuses for a person and their poor character traits because you love them.  And by not addressing their behavior and how they treat others, you are complicit in that behavior and must not be surprised when they begin to treat you in the same fashion.  When you allow them to believe their behavior is acceptable, you set the ball in motion.  Eventually that ball will pick up speed and come rolling down upon you.  And when that happens, as much as you want to, resist the urge to blame your friend.  For the responsibility is yours to demand people in your life act accordingly or excuse them from your life.  That doesn’t require a break up of massive magnitudes, it could just mean distancing yourself and/or changing your relationship in order to preserve it.  That can be what saves a relationship and prevents you from having to experience the traumatic break up.  More than likely the friendship will fade to black. 

With a few key strokes, I was reminded today why the friend that caused me so much grief in 2010/2011 never made it to 2012.  She is an asshole.  She is a cold hearted person who is extremely miserable in her own life and takes that misery out on anyone who she believes is possibly happy in their own life.  For as much as she believes herself superior to others, she is in fact the greatest demonstration of an underachiever ever.  For all the effort her parents put into her being well rounded with her education and extra-curricular activities, they failed in teaching her to be a good, decent human being capable of sustaining loving, respectful, honest relationships where both parties are able to be held accountable for their behavior.  She isn’t a supportive friend, except of course when you are participating in self-destructive behavior, then she supports you 100% because she gets a thrill from seeing people destroy their lives, it helps her to justify her often messy, unstable, unhappy life.  The more willing you are to destroy yourself, the more supportive she will be, it helps her feel better about herself.   As much as she believes herself one who always keeps it real, she lives in a fantasy world where up is down, left is right and she is never responsible for her behavior (although you must always be).  She is mean to people she proclaims to care about and she finds nothing wrong with that.  She isn’t a nice person.  Looking back, the last time she was a nice person, we were in Junior High School. 

Letting people stay in your life too long is begging for a traumatic ending, one which will cause you much more pain and anguish than you really need.  Let people go when you see they don’t fit into your mold of what a good friend is.  Let people go when they show you how they treat people who they claim to love, for it will only be a matter of time before they treat you exactly the same way.  And when they do, you will be the one to blame. 

Today I was reminded exactly why 2012 doesn’t include this person and no year going forward will ever include her again.   And as my connections to her continue to disappear, I am confident that having spent 20 years of my life in a friendship with her won’t mean much of anything 20 years from now.  Especially since the valuable lesson I learned from our traumatic break up will prevent me from ever experiencing a person like her ever again.  A lesson I am eternally grateful to have received, even if it came 20 years too late.