I have always been very lucky to have awesome friends. I have friends from 3rd grade who I am still friends with because they are fun, sweet and well worth the effort. And I have made a lot of friends throughout my life. Some have been in my life for a shorter period of time than others but all had an impact on me.
Friendship can be tricky. Especially as you grow. You go through different stages in your life and sometimes they don’t line up. That can be really hard. You love a person but when you don’t see the world through the same lens because your priorities are different, it takes even more work to stay together. Sometimes that is worth it.
Other times its not.
As I have gotten older I have gotten a lot less tolerate of self-induced drama. Don’t get me wrong, some drama will come into a person’s life no matter what they do. Illnesses, child issues, divorces, work problems can all cause massive drama for someone who never wanted it in the first place. Those friends need all the love and support I can give them. Sometimes I am not the best at always being there but I do try.
But other times, some friends seek out drama. They get into relationships that are bad for them. Or worse, have on again off again relationships with a person that is clearly as deep into the drama as they are. I had a friend who did this for years. Years. They never talked about the hard stuff like do you want kids, what are your thoughts on marriage, etc. But yet they kept going back to each other even though it was a mess.
Now I try not to judge on relationships because I am far from good at them, but damn it was rough. I would get calls asking my opinion where it was really really clear the goal was that I say “oh that person is bad for you”. But then right back to them.
sigh
That gets tiring real quick. I want to support a person to be better. And I am a fixer by nature. So eventually I stopped responding. I let the friendship die. It needed to. My life likes to create drama by doing things like getting calls at 11pm about a family member being rushed to the ER or someone dying suddenly. It happens way more than I would like it to (which is never but I get a call about once a month around one of these topics on average and for about a year and half if was both a month). I don’t want to deal with others self-imposed drama.
Now I can develop crushes and get moody and sometimes act like a teenage girl sometimes. But I would like to think it is not that common. And I am fine when my friends do the same. But that is once in a while and that is normal. But when all you talk about how this sucks or that sucks or how this person is horrible, it is straight up draining.
I want to talk about goals and ambitions. I want to talk about crazy dreams and do deep dives on movie plots. Or how great a song is or how you were able to lift a new weight. Those things are awesome and I am always there for that. But if it is all negative and yet never really your fault. Well I will go with a modified version of the old saying - if everyone in your life is all about that drama, the common factor is you.
And what’s worse is that when I am with negative people I can become negative myself. So it puts me in the drama camp and I really don’t like that. I would rather see a play or movie for drama than live it.
So I focus on people in my life who want the same things. To be better. To be stronger. To be kind. They ground me and push me to be a better person.
But sometimes that means I need to cut people from my life no matter how long I have known them or in all honesty, how much I love them. Because boundaries aren’t about making others angry, they are about showing yourself respect.
