About Time
A few weeks ago, something happened that if you’d asked me before that moment, I wouldn’t have believed could ever happen: I ended two very toxic friendships. These people had been in my life for several years, and although our formerly close friendships had soured, taking a toll on all of us, I hadn’t been ready to end things. I should have been. When I was constantly getting hurt, constantly afraid to speak my mind — I should have been.
But I wasn’t.
Since then, I’ve thought a lot about why we stay: there, quiet, sad. Growing up, the messages I received from my parents, from teachers, from role models and other authority figures all sounded like variations on, “Be nice. Be quiet. Be polite.” People who should have been telling me, “Be fierce. Be you. Be brave,” didn’t. They pressed into me the importance of niceness like I would later press flowers into pages: from my grandma’s funeral, from a boy, from my prom.
I didn’t learn how to protect myself and my spaces and my voice. I didn’t learn that sometimes, speaking up for yourself is more important than being a peacekeeper. I didn’t learn that some people see (friends, co-workers, romantic partners) would see me as weak because I wasn’t often loud.
I should have.
***
Recently, I turned 30. I’ve been thinking about how I spent my 20’s putting myself last. I didn’t leave my town when I wanted to because others wanted me to stay. So I stayed. And that snowballed into a pattern of letting my wants and needs fall to the wayside because someone else needed me to be strong for them, or needed a doormat.
I spent my 20’s waiting. Holding my tongue. Avoiding confrontation when someone had truly wounded me.
I don’t want to be that woman anymore.
My 30’s are for cultivating my spaces, online and offline, and making my stand and protecting those spaces. For speaking up about important things, and for defending myself if need be.
My 30’s are for using my voice to amplify others who are doing good work, and for using my voice to lift up friends and spread love. To spread kindness.
My 30’s are for making opportunities happen for me. For encouraging the supportive, good, positive people in my life. For keeping my heart open, but vetting who I let into it, going forward.
My 30’s are for taking care of myself and not feeling bad about it.
***
Friendships end. Doors close. Romances shatter.
Sometimes we see the end coming and have time to batten down the hatches, pulling our walls up to weather the storm.
Sometimes we don’t.
This experience wasn’t something I saw coming, at least, not then, and not how it happened. I wish I’d known. I wish I’d said more or less or something else entirely. I wish I’d been more graceful or less graceful. I wish I wish I wish —
***
After, I woke up the next morning, relieved. I took a deep breath, then another, and I knew that whatever had happened, whatever my part in it, that I had to move on. The ties were severed for a reason: to free me from how weighed down I had constantly felt in these friendships. I’d felt that I was walking on eggshells, unable to speak my mind, unable to confide in them for fear of upsetting the balance–that fine, fragile balance, where the relationship was positive as long as the spotlight was on them. I felt like a third wheel. I was unable to breathe, unable to ask for the kind of support I was used to in my other friendships, for fear I’d be labeled as selfish.
That is not friendship. Not a healthy one, at least.
Part of me recognized that the clumsy ending was a good thing. It was over, the BandAid finally ripped off. There would be no agonized emails or texts trying to repair the damage. We couldn’t go back. The curtain had been pulled back. I had seen the way they were capable of treating me (and others that I cared about). They had seen that I was no longer willing to keep silent in order to be their guilty cheerleader.
We’ll never know when the first fissure, egg-shell delicate but invasive, happened. We’ll never know what small hurt settled into our bloodstreams, slowly poisoning what was once good and bright.
But that history and those wounds and the light and the laughter and the blame and the end all have to be put away now, bundled away as I take uncharted steps into my future.
***
There’s a peculiar kind of grief when you end a friendship. It has the same weight and shape as when you end a romantic relationship, but it creeps into your bones differently. It presses into them like the bones themselves have gone soft, and that aching sorrow is filtering through.
It’s worse, more convoluted, when you know you’ve done the right thing. When you know that had you stayed, you wouldn’t have changed them, or how you were around them.
Sometimes, all you have is the knowledge that you survived. It hurt like hell, but you survived. You ripped yourself out of their story, where you were nothing but a minor character, and line-by-line, you’re finally writing your own.
And it’s about time.
