Honesty Is The Best Policy, Or How I Acknowledged A Toxic Character Trait

I read an article recently, about being ghosted by a friend. I shared in on Facebook and it got a lot of response.

This is apparently a thing people have dealt with (not just me!), and I was so glad I shared it.

We have a tendency to think we're the only ones who go through a thing. I don't know if it's narcissism or entitlement but sometimes we just miss common threads of experience that bind us together.

My recent experience was the loss of a friend during my divorce.

I mostly didn't talk about what wasn't working in my marriage. There were so many reasons for that. First of all, I myself didn't want to think about what wasn't working in my marriage. I had given up thinking that our problems could be solved and had resigned myself to just living with them. I had told myself that I could just push them aside and choose to be happy anyway. Clearly, that was not entirely successful.

I also felt like talking about the issues meant that my friends would know. If they knew, they couldn't unknow. It could change how they felt about my husband, or how they felt about me, or how they felt about us.

So when I announced my divorce, I had to explain why I was getting divorced, which, to good friends who'd never heard anything seriously bad before, seemed really crazy. One friend seemed to come to the conclusion that I was just justifying a decision to leave and be with Shawn. While part of me understands it, the other part of me wonders what it was about me that would lead her to think that way. Wouldn't common sense alone indicate that no one wakes up in a great relationship and says they'd like to end their perfectly happy marriage for no reason?

She made the decision to end our friendship. She didn't ghost me. She was upfront. She said she just couldn't support me through my divorce. She didn't agree with it, and she couldn't be there for me.

It hurt. It wasn't the lingering hurt I'd experienced when a friend disappears without reason. It was the sudden wrenching hurt of being completely misunderstood. Of being left behind at a time when I was clinging to the people who felt safe and familiar. It was the pain of thinking that maybe I really was burdening those who loved me with more than they could handle.

It was fear that I was not a person who was worth loving, worth being there for, worth seeing through the dark. It was my deepest fears of worthlessness realized.

I could blame her for this. I could say she wasn't a loyal friend. I could say she chose to believe the worst of me rather than the best of me. I could say that I would have been there if she'd needed me, and likely still would. All of this is or at least could be accurate. But it's not the whole story. And we learn nothing if we don't tell the whole story.

Because it's also true that it's too easy to put all the blame for the breakdown of any relationship entirely on the other person.

I'm nothing if not self-reflective. I'm constantly pulling apart the threads of my own thought patterns and feelings to see what's working and what isn't, and there is a thread that has come up again and again: I wasn't honest. Not completely.

There was a core of myself and my experience that I hid in order to protect an image of myself. I can wrap it up in not badmouthing my ex-husband, and there's an element of truth there. I can wrap it up in the idea that I wasn't being honest with myself a lot of the time either, which is also true. But neither of these reasons excuse it.

I should have been more honest with myself instead of stuffing the feelings down and covering them up until it all fell apart. That wasn't fair to my ex. I should have been more honest with the people closest to me about how I was struggling. Maybe they would have been disappointed in me. But maybe they also would have been encouraging and understanding.

When we don't trust those closest to us, we miss the opportunity to make ourselves better. We miss the opportunity for our friends to rise to the challenge of caring for us, which in turn will allow us to better care for them when they have need of us. We are not solitary creatures, us humans. We are pack animals by nature, each bearing more burden when we have the strength to and counting on our pack to shoulder more when we can't.

This does not make us weak. Our imperfections do not define us. Our ability to care for one another does. I'm sorry I was not more honest with my ex-friend, just as I'm sorry she chose not to support me. But since the only person I can control is myself, I'm choosing to see what I can learn and what I can carry forth into the future.

We all have some toxic traits, but that's all the more opportunity we have to be better than we were yesterday. And we can be so much better than we were yesterday.

Be Brave. Be Kind. Do Better.