The Vine: October 29, 2014
Up until 18 months ago, I’d been living in Europe for 20 years, married to an EU dude.
EU Dude dumped me rather suddenly and unceremoniously and, long story short, I lost it all — marriage, house, money, possessions, country of residence and familiarity, job, everything. Forty years old and suddenly I found myself with the resources of a teenager (but with none of the fearlessness, unfortunately). With everything around me burning, I had exactly two months to make a decision about where in my country of origin I was going to plop myself. I had not lived here since I was a teenager, never learned how to drive, had only the vaguest understanding of what words like “deductible” and “co-pay” meant, and was scared. I mean scared. How I wish now that I could say I was a FEARLESS FEMALE WARRIOR who took LEMONS and made LEMONADE because NOBODY PUTS BABY IN A CORNER and rah rah rah. How I wish I had not succumbed to my terror.
But I did.
Despite the pleading of several close friends (who, honestly, were right and I knew it), I made the decision to move to Southern State. An old boyfriend from high school, who had wasted no time in swooping on in there after it was made known that I was getting the boot from my husband, filled my head with promises of how okay everything was going to be. He was also given to odd meltdowns and particularly cruel insults when he was upset about something, but hey. Everybody is stressed, right? Plus, he was so nice and kind 25 years ago. Plus, you know, terror. Here was a financially secure man offering to support me. No, fearless female warrior I was not.
So I moved to Southern State. I spent ten months there. I had no car, no license, a few scattered jobs here and there that were a vicious pain in the ass to get to, and a new boyfriend whose abuse I flatly refused to acknowledge despite how utterly textbook it was. Ten months is not the decades and decades that some women suffer these types of relationships, and it was only months after finally extricating myself from the situation and moving to Northern State to camp in Uncle’s basement that I came to realize how incredibly lucky I was that nothing extremely bad happened to me. The insults got crueler and crueler, the drinking was constant, the threats and intimidation wretched, the physical assaults terrifying. I moved into the spare bedroom and slept with a knife under my mattress. I told my friends that, if anything happened to me, tell the police that my boyfriend was the one who did it. Bad scene.
One of the worst things he did to me was attempt to cut me off from my friends and family. (Totally textbook.) He was only completely successful in one instance — my best friend of nearly three decades, the woman who was a sister to me, the woman with whom I shared the one bond I had every confidence could never be broken. He very cleverly, very deviously drove a wedge between us, telling me that he did not like how often I spoke to her, that I was too “emotionally dependent” on her, and then he would write to her (we all went to the same high school, so they knew each other well) and tell her that she was screwing up my head with contradictory advice (contradictory to what he wanted me to do, obviously).
Between the total devastation and despair I was dealing with divorce-wise, the complete pissing of myself over my impending international relocation, and trying to manage this ill-advised blooming “romance,” I lost all ability to deal. I retreated. I stopped speaking to anybody except him. I just couldn’t deal. Nobody was particularly thrilled about that, but she reacted especially badly. Understandably.
She ended up sending me a nasty e-mail. Nasty. I’d ignored her one too many times. There was a particularly devastating list of all of the things I had done over 25 years that she felt made me a despicable person. It was a shock. Even more shocking than my husband dumping me, and that was pretty shocking. I begged her forgiveness. I tried to explain that Boyfriend and I were trying to work out what I was going to do with my life and negotiate this new relationship, everything was so crazy, I still loved her, please understand. But she was done understanding. The Boyfriend had gotten cruel with her too, and I did not stand up for her. No forgiveness. Can’t say that I blame her, in retrospect.
Or can I??
It’s been six months since I left Southern State. I’m doing well now. It took a few months, but it happened. And I miss my friend. Oh god, so much.
Sars, it’s so hard for me to see things clearly. Should I be angry at my best friend of decades and decades for exploding at me and abandoning me at the worst time in my whole life, when I needed a friend more than I ever had before? My best friend who refused to speak to me during my ten nightmare months in Southern State despite a long e-mail I wrote her (after a few months) once again begging her forgiveness? Is that grounds for not missing her? I’m not sure, since the intense missing of her makes it hard for me to judge. Should I write to her again? Should I say, “OMG see it was this whole crazy misunderstanding! Actually Boyfriend turned out to be super-scary and abusive and I left him after ten months and now I live in Northern State, let’s be friends again!”? No, that seems wrong. And yet. Miss her.
What would Sars (and readers) do? This time I will listen.
All the very best to you!
Kerstin
Dear Kerstin,
All right, well, let’s take the “should”s out of it; you feel how you feel, and how you feel is pissed, and that is okay. That is allowed. You spend a lot of time in this letter listing all the reasons you withdrew from the friendship and why it’s not really your fault and you didn’t deserve the spurning you got, and…okay, but it’s not really me you’re trying to convince. It’s yourself. You have the right to feel angry and hurt; we always have the right to our feelings. It’s when we bring them to others that things get tricky. Stupid human society!
…Just kidding. (Mostly.) (Totally!) (…Mostly.) Your real question is, I think, “Now what?”, and I don’t have a great sense of what exactly went down between the two of you that finally caused her to cut ties; I don’t know how your friendship functioned through the years with you in Europe, I don’t know what her Kerstin Shit List consisted of, etc., so I don’t know the prospects for repairing the friendship. I do know that [extends mic stand into audience] friendships have a lifespan; it may be that this one reached its end. It may be that BF feels like she overreacted, but she doesn’t know how to walk it back now so she’s decided what’s done is done. It may be that what you see as “begging her forgiveness,” she sees as not really hearing her issues with your behavior and thinking an abject enough apology will return things to the way they were…which was not a way she was happy with.
Again, you spend the bulk of the letter laying out the reasons for your estrangement — and not as much on the results. As I said, I don’t know what exactly precipitated BF’s email, and from the sounds of it, the Shit List contained items that pre-dated the abusive asshat and his isolation of you by some years; you don’t get into that either. And he was an asshat, and he was abusive, and the most important thing is that you saw him clearly and got away from him. This is all justifiable reason for falling out of touch, or acting in what appears to an outsider to be a selfish manner. Shit got out of control. But the result, from BF’s perspective, is that you weren’t there for her and expected her to bear with you, and I’m inferring that it isn’t the first time.
So, separate the reasons and the results here — on both sides. Because you don’t really say why you miss her, either. You’ve known her forever? She knows where all the skeletons are? That’s not enough sometimes. Whatever your motivation, forgive yourself for accidentally shutting BF out, forgive yourself for the situation that led up to that (because part of your reason-listing is self-blaming, so be nicer to yourself about that stuff), let yourself feel angry about her reaction, and be honest with yourself about what you really want from the situation. If you want her to say she’s sorry, well, okay; you probably won’t get that, at least not right out the gate, but it’s okay to want it and to tell yourself about it. If you want to change so that she’ll love you again, well, okay; you should take a longer look at that, but it can’t hurt to tell yourself about that, either. Be truthful about what you want here, and realistic about whether you can get it (or should), and then, if you want to reach out to her, send an email — one, a short one, about how you miss her friendship and you hope for another shot at it. No “it’s not my fault because,” no “but how could you“; don’t lawyer it. “I miss you and all our laughs. I’m sorry I made you feel bad.”
And then go to therapy, or a survivors’ group, or both and talk about what it’s like to start over at the beginning in a life that feels like tight shoes, because that’s what you’re having to do thanks to your divorce — which you also kind of skim over, not for nothing — and you’re flailing around just like a perfectly normal human being, and you might need some help figuring out what you’re clinging to because you need one thing to stay the same, and whether BF is one of those things.
But: you’re going to figure it out. Everyone was shitty to you at the same time, and I’m sorry about that. Give yourself the break they didn’t, now and then.
Tags: friendships
“There was a particularly devastating list of all of the things I had done over 25 years that she felt made me a despicable person.”
This is really the thing I can’t wrap my head around. Let’s say she didn’t know you were in a controlling, abusive relationship and was upset because you’d ignored her one too many times. This still isn’t the way to respond to that. Ever.
I am a bad friend when my friends are in bad situations/relationships, because I get all freaked out for them and stomach achey and eventually I learned that in situations like that, I have to walk away for my own health. I don’t leave the friend with a list of grievances, because that wouldn’t be me being a bad friend, it would be me not being a friend at all. (I am also clear up front with close friends about this friendship failing of mine.) To me, if a friend has had a really bad time of it, that’s not the time to dump on them. It might be break time, or break-off time, but it’s not dumping time like your bff did to you.
I once was in a really bad place too, Kerstin. I too did the drop-out thing. I told people I needed a break, a real break, and that I would contact them when I was in a better headspace. Only one person was angry and resentful about it, because somehow it was all about ME REJECTING THEM, not about me dealing with my problems. Later, I tried to make amends with that person and that ME-ness kept coming up in a dozen others ways, and while we now are polite to one another due to mutual friends, we are not ourselves friends and we will never be friends again. If I had to articulate why, it comes down to that moment: when things were bad for me, and that person attacked rather than stepped back.
I agree with Sars: you feel how you feel and that’s okay no matter what that feeling is. And…everything else Sars said, too. And maybe one day the two of you will look back and agree you were both in a bad place and to never speak of it again. Or maybe you might try to make amends or make amends and see that who she was in that moment is actually who she is. At least your eyes are open going into this. Good luck, and best wishes.
Gah. Let me say off the top that Sars is more sympathetic than I am; read on at your own risk.
The insistence that you’re Not a Fearless Warrior reads to me as though you expect to be therefore excused from being responsible for your own life. Guess what: nobody’s fearless. The world does not give a flying hootytoot about any of us. We all have to cobble together, bit by bit, day by day, beset on all sides by terrors real and imagined. Your lot is miserable at the moment, but you’re the only one that can change it, bit by bit, day by day. Just because you’re afraid doesn’t mean you have to flail. You can choose Not Flailing.
It also strikes me that your fixation on getting your friend to forgive you is a pretty handy excuse to avoid doing the actual work of atoning. Which is different from apologizing, because it often takes the shape of fixing yourself. She made a list, she made you feel despicable, she has to forgive you and take you back. All you seem to want to do is wail and perform at a little groveling, which you admit you don’t sincerely feel. You feel how you feel; I don’t get a sense you know (or care?) what she feels. Have some compassion for her and let her go. At least until you can be a friend worth having, and by then you’ll have made other friends anyway, and maybe ones who won’t make lists at you.
Given your letter, Sars response, and AJ’s comment above, I see a possible pattern: EU Dude, Southern Dude, and Former BF are all very self-centered. I could be way off, but I wonder if they all expected you to behave in a certain, passive way; then when you didn’t, they got angry. You’ve heard what you “should” be and “should” do all your life, so now you’re telling yourself that.
Look at it this way: you ran back to where you were 20-25 years ago. Back then, you attached yourself to people like the above. But then, you grew up. You’re not a passive accoutrement anymore, and they don’t like that. I think in their eyes, you’re not supposed to be able to take care of yourself — the fact that you are, without their help, I’m sure they find very irritating.
Do you know how strong you are, that you’ve been able to cope, walk away, to not insist on using the “I’m a victim” lens?
I’d take Sars’ analysis that you’re asking “now what?” a step further: you know what these people were like, you know you don’t want that, but maybe you don’t know where to look for normal people who are okay with the fact that you have a spine. Or how friendships like that are supposed to feel, since it’s not familiar. I like Sars’ suggestion of a survivor’s group because that’s probably the most valuable place to find those people, and help you figure out how to recognize others like them.
What sucks is that it will take more time. You’re not even two years out from the Meltdown From Hell; it’s just not enough yet. It sounds trite, but maybe one step at a time, with a goal of looking back a year from now with no specific purpose other than seeing how far you’ve come? And being a whole lot kinder to yourself while you do that.
I’m wondering if your now-estranged friend is one of the ones who thought you shouldn’t move to Southern State? If that’s the case, then her outside perspective on the series of events could very well be “Best friend moves to wrong place, gets involved with guy, guy’s an asshole to me specifically, and now best friend is ignoring me entirely.” I’m certainly not saying that she’s in the right, but it seems like there could just be a huge discrepancy between what was presented to the world and what was really going on – often the case in abusive relationships. If you decide to pursue her friendship, I’d lay out the facts about what was actually happening – and, as Sars said, no blaming or begging – and at least give her a fuller picture. If she still isn’t receptive after that, I don’t think it’d be a great loss to not consider her a friend any longer.
With all that said, though, I’m really glad that you’re out of a bad situation. I’m hoping for the best for you.
I think AJ made some great points (and was awesome enough to share a personal perspective).
That being said, you’ve been through a hell of a lot of devastation, and made some mistakes, but that makes you human and imperfect like the rest of us. I hope you’re working on forgiving yourself, but also on rebuilding – not huge, magical leaps, but small steps, rebuilding your foundation one stone at a time. There aren’t many people who were born “warrior princesses.” Most had to develop that way and learn some hard lessons.
You should also take Sars’ advice, if you haven’t already, and find counseling and/or a support group. You need that to help you rebuild.
Finally – I think you need to let this former friend go. It sounds like you’ve already tried to rebuild and she’s unwilling to forgive. I think you owe it to yourself to move on.
Sorry, but I’m with Attica on this one (and many other things, I’m sure). Your letter talks a lot about how your former friend’s email to you hurt you, and how much you needed / now need her friendship, but I keep thinking about how devastated she must have been when you told her you couldn’t talk to her so you could focus on the guy who was cruel to her and eventually cruel to you too. You say she was like your sister, but yet you lived in two different countries, and chose to divest yourself of the friendship when things were too tough. I get it – you had a rough time, and you couldn’t be a good friend. Do you get that? Because that’s probably, at the end of the day, what this ends up being about. If you were a crappy friend who only wants the friendship when you need support, that’s your answer. If you’re now in a place where you can be a good friend, tell her that. But you have to mean it – friendship is a two-way street, and you can’t just expect any of your friends to support you at your convenience while you float in and out of the relationship when things happen in your life.
I wish you luck, and am happy that you’ve extracted yourself from a scary situation. Focus on taking good care of yourself, and the friendships will come, even if they’re not the same ones from before.
I have been in a very similar situation, although from the friend’s side not the letter writer’s side, so I may be coming at this from a different perspective.
My friend was in a similar situation to yours (although without the horrific abuse, it was “only” verbal) and I was the friend who was trying to support her from afar and be helpful. Her boyfriend constantly put her down, told her that her friends and interests were unimportant and a waste of time, and did a good job of cutting her off from people.
For years, I was there for her no matter what, at all hours of the day and night, even though we lived in different states. I was a sounding board, a sympathetic ear, a cheerleader. We would talk for hours, all about her life and problems, never mine. After a two years of this, I finally had it and put it all out there in one of her marathon phone calls. I told her it was a one-sided friendship and while I loved her, she knew what the problem was, knew what she needed to do, and I was walking away until that happened. Of course, she accused me of being a terrible friend, I “didn’t understand what she was going through”, she needed unconditional support, she needed someone who could listen and be there for her…it was all “she needed, she needed, she needed”. That’s when I realized what had once been a great friendship was now over.
Friendship is not one-sided. You can’t demand forgiveness, apologies, sympathy or understanding. It sucks, but that’s life. I hope that you’re on your way to healing yourself, but I think you need to let this friend go. If she finds her way back to you, great, but that should be her choice at this point, not something that you try to convince her to do.
This letter reads like classic PTSD.
You’re out, thank God, of the physically dangerous situation, but your brain is still in the thick of battle. It’s seeing everything through a PANIC STATIONS lens, and focusing only on the things that both make you feel bad and bizarrely secure in that, since it’s justification for how bad you feel.
You need therapy stat. There’s no way to sort out the friendship thing until you have a lot firmer grip on your self–your real self, not the EMERGENCY ZOMBIES AT THE DOOR self. And that sorting won’t be all pretty. You’ll find out a lot of things about yourself that are icky, or depressing, or make you feel like the people in your life treated you badly because you deserved it. That’s not true, but it doesn’t change having to slog through that crap.
You may have done some hurtful things. It may be hard to face up to that. But it does not mean you deserved how you were treated by your husband or ex abuser, nor is said abuse an excuse to not face the damage done to you and by you. Strength is in the doing.
To all y’all. Every single last one of you have perception abilities that are way above normal and it’s spookily awesome. I wrote this in a moment of turmoil and, going back and re-reading it, I’m surprised anyone was able to infer anything from it other than “why is a petulant 12 year old reading Tomato Nation?” But it seems that each person who responded zeroed in on a different root, exposed it, and then hugged me. ? I can’t thank you enough for your comforting, honest, and forthright words. I’m not sure if you guys and Sars fully realize the impact of the time you take to show kindness and compassion to strangers, but if you aren’t, you should be. As many of you pointed out, there’s a whole lot of information missing. Information that does not make me look terribly awesome. Admittedly. So much confusion. And with three key people in my life deciding that I was despicable all around the same time, and the resulting panic making it difficult for me to objectively see my responsibility in anything (Attica picked up on this immediately), I did not do my best. I did not do the best I could have done. Kristin 2 points out that I do not seem to be totally realizing the impact and sadness my actions caused my best friend and she’s probably right. And, similarly, I can see that I’m not the only imperfect one, here, too. But I struggle. I’m completely unfamiliar with edges. I read about other women who have gone through five thousand times worse with dignity and grace and I think “why am I so pathetic. Why am I so bad, why am I so weak, how could I have made the decisions I made.” So my petulant 12 year-old plaintive wail was more about that than actually “give me a list of steps to take, here.” Thank you for recognizing that immediately. Thank you for ignoring the junior high histrionics and focusing on words that would help me. And all of it helped me. The support group idea is one that genuinely did not even occur to me and it’s a great idea. It’s amazing how you blank on the bleeding obvious sometimes. Despite my current EVERYTHING SUX!!!!! bleating, I have had some strokes of unbelievably good luck at different points in life, some on a small scale and some on a grand scale. So I consider each and every response here on a grand scale. Every one of you said important things. I wish I could convey that. I wish I was a better writer so that I could find better words to describe how important your words are. I have re-typed this sentence a million times and it sounds trite. But the sentiment isn’t trite at all. You guys, you did something so important, so selfless and important. If it felt like you were just clacking on a keyboard or killing the dead time between 4:30-5:00 at work, you weren’t. It was terrifically important to me.
Attica, the disclaimer at the top of your post is unnecessary. What I took away from it is, actually, a deep form of sympathy. Your friends are lucky to have a friend who is honest, perceptive and concise and isn’t afraid to show caring no matter how hard it might be to hear. I wish I’d had someone like that 18 months ago. And “Have some compassion for her and let her go. At least until you can be a friend worth having, and by then you’ll have made other friends anyway, and maybe ones who won’t make lists at you” wins. It just wins.
Thank you Sars, AJ, Attica, Cora, Angharad, Mingle’s Mommy, and Kristin 2. Buy lottery tickets because your karma is off the charts today.
I have two feelings about this situation. One is that you need to give yourself a break. The other is that you need to give your friend a break, for as long as she needs it.
I have a dear friend who makes bad decisions, some of which put her in precarious positions. I love her very much, and when the shit hits the fan I want to be able to help her clean it up. But I have to admit that shit-cleaning is exhausting, especially life-threatening shit, or shit I could have predicted would happen. I like to think I do better at setting boundaries than your friend did — mailing you a 25-years-long list of grievances wasn’t kind, and I don’t mean to excuse that. But while you were being abused, she was probably (reasonably) fearful for your life and (unreasonably, but understandably) resentful that she had to carry that fear around for you. It takes time to get past those feelings, and honestly, she might not ever get there. You’ve done everything you can, I think; the ball’s in her court as far as the friendship goes.
That’s about giving your friend a break. But seriously, give yourself a break too. The last 18+ months of your life have been scary: repatriation is a Big Deal; anyone surprised by a divorce is going to go down some blind alleys before finding a good path; and domestic violence is much more common than any of us would like it to be. I think the most important thing is to establish roots in your new home with an eye toward giving yourself a solid support structure — say, a good job, a home you like, a good volunteer post or hobby, and a reasonably diverse network of friends. This all takes time, probably a few years of effort, would be my guess, and the point isn’t to beat yourself up about not being there already. The point is to develop a solid enough life with enough support-posts to it that you can be a good friend to others. Reciprocity is the key to stable friendships, and it is much easier to manage when you are taking care of yourself first — because the more supports you have in place, the less likely you are to need to put more weight on any one of them than it can bear, and the more likely you are to find opportunities to pay it forward.