mf

Maybe this is coming up for me because I read an article about friendship breakups. Maybe it was the particular word choices in a psychology video. Or maybe... I don't know.

I worry, sometimes, about the number of people in my past who can accurately be described as "former friends." But only in the sense that I worry a bit about what other people might think. I don't worry that there's something wrong with me, the way I used to.

In the past few days I've been remembering stuff about a couple of former friends. Not stuff I'd forgotten, exactly, just stuff I hadn't thought of in so long that it's like watching a movie I haven't seen in 10 years and suddenly realizing that I see it completely differently, you know? And yeah it's like suddenly I'm thinking about these people and it's like I'm a character on a detective show, I'm putting together pieces, and running them through software I didn't have at the time of the incident, and what's coming out is that a bunch of stuff I used to think of as personality quirks, now show up as big red flags.

And I'll be honest, I don't really know what to do with that. It's not something I want to bring up with... pretty much anyone. Or do I? Not the details, I don't want to go over them again. I did that enough when it happened and then again in therapy. Nor the emotions, that is, I don't want to have a "that's rough, buddy" conversation. Some of the stuff I've been thinking about happened fifteen years ago, I mean, they're basically cold cases.

It's more like... maybe I'd like a high five? Maybe even - staying with the cold cases image - in a detective way? In a "you looked at the pieces and you noticed a pattern, go you" way?

I don't know, you guys. I just... Look. I keep remembering behaviours that, at the time, I brushed off as awkwardness, or as anxiety. Things people did, things they said, that were hurtful and thoughtless. Things that I've remembered separately, like one by one, and thought "that was... toxic. Actually." But I'd just sort of... never put it together?

In retrospect it seems really obvious that someone who described literally any human interaction 'emotional labour,' who got angry at people who mentioned their relationship status at the end of a conversation rather than at the beginning, who mocked their other friends in private conversations with me while maintaining kind and polite relationships with those friends in public forums... was never someone with whom it was safe to form an emotional bond. And it seems almost absurd that it's taken me this long to catch on that the person who had what the psychology videos call "dysregulated displays of anger," who fixated on perceived slights, who discussed past interactions with literally everyone but the people originally involved, who insisted on driving their new girlfriend everywhere [pause to shudder]... wasn't someone safe.

Just to clarify: I don't wish things had been different. I think experience shapes us and makes us who we are, and I wouldn't want to be a different person in a different place now. I just also think that I'd never... realized. All that. And now I think (I think?) I'm wanting to articulate my inarticulate feelings of "huh."

But who knows. Maybe that's not it at all. Maybe this entry is really just about how, this afternoon, I briefly felt a deep desire to look a couple of people in the eye and say: "hey asshole, did you ever stop to think that other people don't know what the fuck they're doing either? So maybe if you can find time to whine about how awkward you feel, you can find time to think that other people might feel awkward too! Oh, sorry, are you too busy thinking about how smart you are and how the tedious requirements of human interaction are beneath you? Well tell you what: why don't you take your persecutory ideation and shove it up your ass."