Calling time on friendship.  When do we give up?

It is sad to think that people who were once so important to us can fall by the wayside.  Sometimes it is happenstance.  No conscious will, rather the absence thereof, and gradually you drift apart, and one day wake up and don’t even notice.  

At other times, there is a rupture or a series of ruptures.  And everything just crumbles in your hands.  Or you give up trying.

All relationships take work.  Some are characterised by ease.  Others are just a sheer strain.  Some have aspects of both, owing to changing life circumstances.

I do believe that I have a fatal flaw.  I am too willing to walk away.  My wife was one of the first and only people I didn’t walk away from.  I probably should have.  But I didn’t.  I also made a life commitment to her.  Swore sacred vows.  I am glad to be released from those now, and to be free of the burden of conscience that might have come were I a bad actor.  She has made it easy to let go.

But this post isn’t about her.  

Possible other Post

I learned to walk away as a baby.  Perhaps I should say crawl.  Or even roll, so early was this “skill” learned.  I guess it is a skill, as it was a survival pattern.  In the book the 5 Personality Patterns, an excellent read, I learned of this as a common archetype: the leaving personality.  The leaving archetype develops from gestation through to about 6 months of age.  The concept behind the personality patters is this: at what age were you first overwhelmed by an inability to cope, to survive?  The age that this occurred in your development becomes your dominant personality pattern.

I was born into strife.  Parents who were already drifting apart, a hostile home environment, a mother whose hopes in my birth were bound up in her own desire to keep her man, an indifferent and absent father.  Even a baby can feel the absence of love, of affection, of touch.  Add a smidge of abuse from both parents in their own separate ways, and you have a rather tasty cocktail of trouble.

What can I say?  I go from this to learning that it isn’t safe to depend on people, that it isn’t safe to love, that it isn’t safe to be open, to have desire, to have needs.  What is safe is to walk away.  Clearly not a healthy set of choices.  Or is it?  Insofar as survival is assured, I guess it is a good set of choices.

Working through them is pretty vital, and as someone who is relentlessly willing to “do the work” even if the place it leads is more a state than anything else, what I am finding is that the path is endless.

Not all revelations come through psychotherapy.  Talk.  Sometimes the truth lies in the body.  Sometimes, they creep up on us, in dawning realisation.

I am well on my path towards becoming a practicing somatic therapist.  The body.  A body worker.  As part of any rich therapeutic training, there is an obligation to also receive…and gosh, for this human, learning to receive is the tallest peak to be ascended.  It is good for me.  Positively therapeutic.

On the table the other day, receiving from a neophyte, a vein opened up from deep inside me.  One that I didn’t expect, was not consciously thinking about, and which revealed itself slowly.

“I never got to be a baby,” the words tumbled out.  A realisation.  

“Never got to be a baby,” she repeated.

“No.  Its unfinished business.  I had to grow up too fast.  Had to learn to hide, to protect myself.”  I can’t remember all the words which tumbled out.  The feelings.  And even whether the words matched the feelings.  But I sense that there is a need to reclaim that.

My therapist will tell me tomorrow morning that I need to be my own mother.  A dear woman friend remarked once that her journey involved “becoming the man my father never was,” and that this is a path that many women need to walk.  

I am to become the mother, the woman, that my mother never was.  And I realise as I write those words, that there is a lot to it.  My siblings felt that our mother was a whore.  I have never been comfortable admitting that I felt the same way.  How did I feel?  I resented my mother’s dependence on men.  I resented her active submission.  I resented how she moulded me in particular, but all of us, to help entice her marks.  We were commandeered into her obsession with gardening, landscaping the yard around our home with flowers, flowing bushes, and a victory garden (the latter driven by economic necessity).  We were “privileged” but our sweaters had holes in them.  All of my clothes except my awful boys underwear, which I railed against, were hand-me-downs.  All of them.  They were ill-fitting, inelegant, scratchy, and ugly.

All I really wanted, deep down, in a place that I couldn’t even admit to myself, was to snuggle with a soft blanket, drink from a bottle, wear diapers, and be held.  And here I am, decades later, still looking for the same thing.  Only for once, I feel that I am teetering on the edge of stepping into it, of getting it, of coming clean, of letting go of the last pocket of shame I might carry, of growing up.  And isn’t it ironic that “growing up” in my case involves regression.

My mother represented so many female archetypes.  As I think about the posse of women who have sustained me through this transition, they are all here, but every single one of them is a stronger example than my mother was.  And this is perhaps because they are the family of choice.  Who are they and what do they represent?

• The Den Mother: fierce protector…worthy of deep trust, knowing that she will decide what is best for me if she has to, and will make a better decision than I will.  This is literally true, as the Den Mother was the person who had POA, my proxy, in case something went seriously wrong when I was being operated on.
• The Whore: I haven’t written about her yet (well, not much), and our story together is not yet finished.  I am forever puzzled by the need/desire I have to be with a professional companion who has sex for a living, and not having sex with her.  I haven’t figured it out, but it feels better than just about anything to play with her and to touch and be touched and to kiss and to speak about women, womanhood, sex, and feminism.  Her lesson to me?  How to take shame and reclaim dignity by running roughshod over that which gifted it to us.
• The Sister: the expression that blood is thicker than water came true for me.  My baby sister, like all women, is my big sister now.  I learned this in a profound way during her two post-op visits.  She was the lynchpin of my care team and was there for me in the most profound way.  Our relationship post-op has gone from good to great…and so deep.  When my surgeon told me that my “caregiver” had to be in the room the day they removed my bandages, the day they removed the catheter and would see if I could pee by myself, and talked to me about so many things, they said, “you won’t be in a shape to understand or pay attention to everything I tell you, and it is a lot of information, and quite overwhelming.  Your sister will pay attention for you.”  And that is what she did.  She also held my hand when I said, “I’m scared,” and started to cry.  And she talked about what it was like to spread her legs and give birth, and told me, “there is nothing that could be going on down there with you that I haven’t seen before or experienced,” and when she talked about flow, her flow, in relation to what the doctor was saying, helping me to understand what it would be like to bleed, I felt so safe.
• The Friend: the most important thing about friendship is being supported without judgement.  Friends relieve feelings of shame, they have your back, and a good posse of friends are the backdrop to a life well-lived.
• The Daughter: we must also give.  The daughter needs something very different than the son, for she has to fight much harder for everything in life…starting with just taking up space.  Our obligations towards her are even greater, for we have to imbue her with strength and self-belief even more, not just stepping back and finding her own confidence.  We have to teach her to fight.
• The Dominatrix: there are many ways to be a dominatrix.  The archetype I have latched onto is atypical, at least how she is with me.  She is not harsh but nurturing and caring and curious.  She is also firm, but this comes not from instruction or rules, but by making me want to please, want to obey, want to serve, want to listen…her dominance of me comes from inside of me.  It is not like anything I have experienced before.  Submission to her requires but a gesture and I am overwhelmed with emotion.  Even when she has been annoyed with me, the gentleness of delivery has only served to intensify my response.  When you need only the lightest touch imaginable to steer, the hand on the tiller, then you know you have achieved a zen state of artistry.  That is how I experience her.

My life is so weird right now.  I feel like I am hallucinating.  It is so special and so utterly unreal.  The universe feels like it is doing back-flips for me.  My vulva is healing magnificently.  I finally exist.  Being a girl, a woman, allows me to explore a softness and a vulnerability that I always sought, already had more than any male upbringing could make of me…but now I am rushing headlong into it.

And I am just letting it unfold.  And this is why it is time to call time on a friendship that is past its sell by date.  I am not willing to fight for it.  We have such deep and beautiful memories, and had such great and mutually sustaining time together, but the past is also the past.  Is there something wrong with me for walking away from that?  I can cherish those things, but I can also decide that judgement, shame and toxicity are not welcome, that they are so unwelcome as to override everything else.  Life is too short to make it that way.  We all deserve better.

In a recent exchange with her around the issue which triggered this post, she re-listed the conflicts that we had had over the past two years, leaving out one equally important one where she outlined why she felt that trans women were stealing opportunity from cis women.  For the rest, she gaslit.  And at the end of it, in response to me saying that I didn’t appreciate her saying that I had shame, as if to say that I should have shame, she told me she didn’t appreciate it, that she didn’t deserve it.  My dear, I have interactions with hundreds of people, and many friends of all degrees, and nobody, not a single other person, gives me this TERF, judgemental and unsupportive energy.  I have no room for that in my life.  None.  No matter how good the rest is. I am the one who doesn’t deserve it…how does someone tell you that they don’t deserve it when they are the ones who are doing whatever it is that isn’t deserved in the first place? That’s effed up.

And yes, I do have shame.  I am ashamed that I wasn’t a better friend to you when you got divorced.  I am sorry that I didn’t defend you and our friendship from my wife who hated you.  And I am ashamed that I didn’t stand up for you, for me, for us.  But it is time to move on.