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.

The Path Explained

I wrote the other day about how, for about a year, I felt like I was walking around in my underwear.

If you've never had this experience, lucky you. Seriously, it was pretty awful.

Interestingly, when the saga began, I was invited to tell my "side" of the story. Of course, not in a friendly place. Not amongst people who actually wanted to hear it. Not so there could be any kind of understanding reached, or peace achieved.

No. I was invited to be shamed, more exposed than I already was, and it would have forced people to choose sides.  One thing you should know about me is that most of the time, I really hate having to take sides when I don't think one should have to. I like it when people can get along. Or at least co-exist peacefully.

It seemed to me the only thing worse than having someone tell my story from their perspective, inaccuracies and all, was also sharing mine, engaging in the drama, and making people choose who to believe.

I couldn't take going through that while my life was so rapidly changing around me. I couldn't navigate my changing circumstances, and also campaign for my reputation. Honestly, my reputation didn't seem like the biggest issue I had. My marriage was ending. An amazing relationship had changed my whole life. I needed to take care of myself and my kids.

So, instead, I put my head down. I put one foot in front of the other and kept going. I hoped that eventually my character and good nature would belie the story told about me. For those unappeased, the truth probably never mattered anyway.

People love to gossip, especially when it has no real bearing on their life at all. For my life, however,  it felt invasive. Like I said, I felt like I was walking around in my underwear, unaware of what people had heard, unaware of what they believed. Hopeful that if they had questions, they would ask me.

Here in the middle of America, however, not everyone thinks everything is their business. That is so different from the coast I grew up on.

I talked to people I knew had heard things, and we discussed the weather, local politics, the state of our schools, and the disposition of our children. Occasionally they would ask a dear friend of mine, "How is Anne? Is she okay?" because they genuinely wanted to know, and they genuinely didn't want to make my life any harder by asking me.

I can't tell you how much I appreciated that. I was in such an odd place. My sixteen-year marriage was falling apart, and I was all out of energy to try to save it. My husband and I had been seeing other people. I had met Shawn and was suddenly gifted with a relationship that worked in every way, and my marriage spiraled downward quickly as my ex and I each reacted to the reality we were confronted with.

Shawn ended the other relationship that he had been in, with someone I knew and had been friends with (they were not exclusive). That relationship ended not with a whimper, but with an explosion of emotion. Break-ups are hard, they hurt, but I was thoroughly unprepared for what followed.

There were posts written about me, my marriage, and my relationship frequently on facebook. Friends were stopped at schools and grocery stores to talk about me and about what was happening with Shawn and with my family.

I stayed quiet. I didn't post about it. I didn't rush to tell my side. I withdrew. There were so many other reasons I stayed quiet.

Let me go back a little...

The summer I turned 18, I was sexually assaulted. The perpetrator, a slightly older friend who often provided alcohol for parties and get together's, was pulled off of me as I was screaming for him to stop, and he was trying to force himself on me. When it was over, the friend who pulled him off of me made it clear that she didn't really think he was going to rape me. She was sure he would have stopped eventually. I really shouldn't make a big deal out of it.

Harder than the assault itself was having him show up to social events. People knew what had happened and chose to believe that it was a misunderstanding and that since I hadn't been raped, it wasn't an assault. I would have panic attacks and have to leave. I was told I was being dramatic. I was so young. Maybe I was being dramatic. But it hurt so much that my experience didn't matter. Later he was killed in a car accident and became practically sainted amongst that group of friends.

That experience made it clear to me that there is a price to pay for people to believe you. I know what it feels like to speak my truth and not be believed by people who should have, because they didn't want to pay that cost. In the end, I preferred to not to make people choose. What was true, wasn't really relevant.

My truth was that I was being harassed.

I blocked my harasser on Facebook at first, then texts. I blocked them via email when the harassment took that route, they took to emailing me from their work email. I blocked that one, too. When I got my new email address after getting married, I had to block them all over again, as they quickly got ahold of it and the messages started again. They encouraged someone to message my father and tell him things that weren't true about Shawn, in the hopes that he would...I don't know....step in and tell his 40-year-old daughter to leave him? I'm not sure. It was bizarre.

When they ran out of ways to contact me, they continued to post. Even taking joy in a surgical complication I had, saying that it was karma, that Shawn was toxic, and that it manifested itself physically for me.

I had a friend come to me concerned. She told me that as someone who is empathetic, I tend to internalize negative energy, and she genuinely felt that living so close to someone who wished me ill on a daily basis, was affecting my health.

I don't know if it was the toxicity of my harasser that played into my complications, but it did have an effect. I was experiencing anxiety and sometimes panic. When I went to public places, I scanned the parking lot for their car, both terrified of running into them, and unwilling to stop living my life because of them.

Something had to change.

So, I did a little housecleaning, lining my windows with a bit of salt, cleaning the front and back porches and doors with a rosemary wash to clear away negative energy. Hey, I'm a Pagan. This is what I do. Even if the effect is just a placebo for my mind, that's a powerful kind of magic all it's own.

Part of me would like to take apart all the things that were said about Shawn and me. Part of me would like to defend us. I would like to explain why I think those things were said, and what they mean. But at this point, I feel to do so would only give those words more power. A power they never should have had in the first place. And people who truly know me, who truly know Shawn, already know the truth about us and who we are.

I don't tell you about the harassment because I want to be a victim. I share this only because it has such an effect on how vulnerable and exposed I felt for months. The person harassing me felt justified in their behavior and I was unable to stop it. All I could do was shut down the avenues of communication, and hope that in time, they would move on to something else.

I'm not naming my harasser here, because this isn't their story. I'm really only sharing this at all because I need to have some ownership of it. Because this part is my story to tell. And because I needed to let it out.

In the midst of this, I divorced. Within a week, Shawn and I went down and got a marriage license. We married 17 days after my divorce was finalized. We just couldn't see the point of waiting to start our life together. It was the best decision I made. I love this man fiercely.

In the end, I knew that people would have their own thoughts and feelings about my life choices. That's the way it always is, isn't it? Choosing him, and a life together was worth it. As hard as it's been to get to this place, I'm happy here. Everything in life isn't perfect. It never is. But we will face it together. What more could I ask for?