[1116] Cornholio

Today has started out with a decent potential for the presumed ADHD to "win." It's a perfect day to work outside, I've slept well, and the tasks calling out to me, from hole digging to starting a new job training and evaluating A.I., are feeling accessible and not too taxing. I've also, for the last few weeks, been having "the universe speak to me" with lines from songs and television shows speaking about friendships, relationships, and the things you should hold dear. Today, I reached out to my "best friend" who I haven't meaningfully spoken to in months after I landed on a few conclusions.

I'm exceptionally eager to cut bullshit people and unproductive soul-crushing lies and games out of my life. I haven't spoken to my mom in at least 10 years. I didn't wish my brother a happy birthday a few days ago. Living alone in bum-fuck cornville has proven to bring more relief and focus than any day I've spent with any amount or type of roommates. That fact alone means I should build in a check when the instinct is to cut one more person off.

I have another friend who said, almost word for word, "Even if you tried to rape me, I'd probably still be your friend and forgive you." Talk about setting the bar simultaneously and unreasonably high and low at the same time, but I understood and appreciated her sentiment.

My "best friend" and I are statistically 2 of the least agreeable people on the planet (we've taken the test) and aggressively manipulative. We're either both/and autistic or psychopaths. Not necessarily mean-spirited or evil ones, but ones with the capacity to wholly uncheck where those propensities might lead us. Until recent history, it never bled over into me feeling at the no-mercy end of his propensities. We've been friends since 5th grade, and we're in our 30s now. It creeps up on you.

That said, it means I've never necessarily set a particularly strong boundary to help refine and determine our dynamic. Most people would understand this in terms of "family." I've dispatched with most of my family, and the ones who remain I'm mostly civil towards in service to my dad. As a counselor, it's, of course, people's families who provoke and inflame their addictive poor-coping tendencies. As a former DCS assessor, it's your family that's touching you inappropriately, beating the fuck out of you, or defiantly donating you to the State when their lack of personal accountability gets particularly egregious. I have no respect or innate positive feeling for "family," as such.

So I set terms. I don't really carry ongoing emotional animous, but I've been fucked financially. I would give, and still do, all of my time and funds that I could to real family and friends. No one who I'm going to designate that way "owes me" for that. When that dynamic gets exploited, thrown in my face, or taken for granted to such an extent I get scared I might die in the dumbest way possible? I can lament so far something I had previously taken for granted, cut it off completely, or set terms for repair. I'm not going to present terms to my batshit mom. I'm not going out of my way to make my brother feel better about his unresolved anxieties and resentments. I'm not going to kiss any of my thieving aunts' or uncles' asses.

My "best friend?" He's been more adrift, than deliberately malicious, in my view. I'm not entirely sure he recognized anymore than I had how much the dynamic had shifted. It took me literally popping off emotionally not wishing to be dead potentially crashing at 135 miles an hour to kick off this latest saga. Some of the chickens regarding his dynamic with the kid seem to have come to roost, but I'm not privy to details, just the grapevine. Ultimately, if I have a handful of friends, each finger I might cut off deserves above-average or beyond base-instinct doctoring.

My job is to set and relay the terms. I talk to enough people who say something like, "Well, if they don't already know…!" about their fights as if that person is thinking about them, mind-reading them, or you told them anything remotely achievable and coherent. I reach out. 99 times out of a 100, I get silence and the chance to imagine how "weird" and "awkward" I made it for someone who thought they'd never hear from me again. I'm considerably less inclined at this stage in my life to hold a grudge, at least with any emotional weight precluding any action steps to bring about a preferred resolution. I'll still cut you off completely, but that doesn't remove my obligation to listen to the universe, do and say what I can, and weigh the balance of my dynamics.

This is the work. This is the living by example. I don't want to be isolated, resentful, and unreasonably angry. That said, what I want rarely, if ever, jives with how people treat me or what they want for themselves. Oh well. There's a reason we get paid to do the work no one else wants to do. I'm not going to continue choosing for myself unreasonable and unnecessary financial or emotional burdens by downplaying or making excuses for an unhealthy relationship. I'm not going to let the pull of "normalcy" or "familiarity" playact as forgiving and forgetting.