I wrote a songfight song once to a title called ‘Who Said I’m Dead.’ There’s a video that I perform in my living room..about a year ago.
I wrote this song about a…I don’t want to call her a frenemy. But she wasn’t MY enemy. To say we were enemies is giving too much credit. We’d never even been Facebook friends ever, is how far back this goes.
My point of this is not to dwell, but to look back. When we have someone who hates us, or who is Jealous of us…this does not have to be a sharp blow to the heart. We don’t have to fix it even. We can learn from it. It can serve us.
This person, I found out, said something about me that got my back up. I should have looked a little further into it.
Because it was true.
It wasn’t true for the reasons SHE thought, but for more fundamental, core reasons that were important to me.
A claim had been made that, in a nutshell, I was just replacing the Old Things in my life with my new choices. I was incapable of real change, real growth. I could only try to copy the life denied me by her rules excluding me from their world – copy it poorly by using new people to replace my old.
This did turn out to be true. I even had warning signs in my new life that things were going in the same direction. Choices that smelled like old mistakes I was making. Old behaviors toward me that smacked of narcissism and self absorption. Little voices popping up and saying “are you really going to do THAT?!? Isn’t THAT just like THIS?!?” and looking at aftermath and wrap-up of the situation and how dead on identical it is to other situations after-the-fact.
And I so hate being the I-told-you-so-er. But I SO always am!!
The funny thing about all this is that even after I “move on,” I don’t burn a bridge. I keep a door open. I think the best of people.
And it’s so funny, because I am reminded, sometimes very inconveniently, that people come in pods. And that unfortunately, they come out of their pods only when they feel you are worth their time and attention.
I got this hammered home to me that I’ve been forgotten, not paid attention to by some near and dear to me, and it’s hard. One of my favorite lines I’ve ever written is “when you leave a room with me in it / you turn out the light.” I think I’ve talked about this before.
I was glad I worked on my Nur Ein instead of going to my 20th reunion.
In the future, I hope I’ll be preoccupied, naturally, when I’m “supposed” to have been waiting with baited breath for others who didn’t have time for me before to suddenly need me to be part of their set of numbers. And not even to be vindictive. Just because I’ve got a life.
It’s possible to be firm but classy, even in the face of bitter, inappropriate sarcasm – as though you did the pushing away in each growing-apart-relationship. And aren’t relationships more complicated? Don’t they require more truth, more honest-loving-scrutiny? Less shaming than is heaped upon the complicated ones we move through in these times…?
In my experience, people find it terribly exhausting to show the intimate best of themselves to more than a tiny handful of people for any good length of quality time – and think it’s okay to lob the cliff notes version around in our forward-it-on society. Intimacy is called upon when needs are had, appropriateness and boundaries are enforced when the time is over. Family is fluid. Blood is thicker than mayonaise unless we’re having jello shots.
I’m just riffing here…
I guess I do let it get to me sometimes.
I like to have a pie made for me. Not store bought. I can tell the difference. I want to open the letter. I want to hold the fabric of it, eat the cupcake, remember what it tasted like, turn those pages in my hands.
I’m just more tactile I guess. Only an investment in a friendship for me, thanks 
I like my love undiluted, and off the microscope slide.
