Effects of People on People
>>—A Journal Entry from August 12, 2015—>
We are all human beings… and as human beings, we are highly influential creatures. Regardless of our stubborn ploys against ourselves when we say “we don’t care what people think about us or that we won’t change for anybody” that will never change the fact that we have been persuaded to be a certain way since we were born. We’ve formed and shaped our own by the people around us, the way we grew up, our environment…All of that has some sort of effect on how we live our lives, whether we like that reality or not. We constantly are being painted by others ideas and beliefs, and by our own and other peoples’ experiences.
Nobody completely has an original thought; it’s all been adapted by someone else’s who built their opinion off another’s ideas. If you look at it all this way: we were all born completely clean –innocent – essentially we were all blank canvases, and life is like a painting. An artist can only move forward if he or she continues to draw lines upon lines, and coloring over the blank areas on the canvas. Independently, that single line that started the painting is not going make up the beautiful masterpiece it eventually becomes. All those lines and color work together to become something more significant. We only progress if we learn from others and except what works and experiment what doesn’t and everything we do is going to affect someone else and what someone else does is ultimately always  going to affect us. That’s out of our control and although that sounds scary, it’s doesn’t have to be.
But let me quit while I’m ahead of myself and get to my main point. Like most everything, there are two sides; a positive and a negative. As people, we seem to always like to draw ourselves away from the light and go towards the strong, compelling, irresistible mystery of the darkness. We have conditioned ourselves to be that way without much thought and we become vulnerable to what we think we want even if something is echoing in the back of our mind to turn back because what we long for is just a wolf in sheep clothing.
We all have a weakness, no matter how strong willed one may be. There is always something that will make us bend in directions we always said we wouldn’t. It happens to the best of us and it usually starts with good intentions. Maybe you wanted to be a helping hand when you saw someone was struggling or because you just were interested in getting to know someone more. Soon enough you’re invested in that person and you either feel like you’d be a terrible person if you were to leave them, due to your own insecurity of being left behind, or because you have been convinced you need them in your life.
I am speaking from complete experience because I know I have more than enough times been magnetized to someone who I thought was going to benefit my life and I somehow could benefit theirs. Each time it took a hard punch of reality to finally realize that I had emotionally attached myself to someone who was all wrong for me. And no matter how many times I told myself that “I could fix things, I can make things better.” It didn’t matter; I needed to finally accept that I needed to cut my losses before I hurt myself more.
When you care about someone that fulfills no kind of profit to your life, you sometimes lose yourself in the threshold of it all. You probably connected on some sort of level and now you think no one else gets you as much as this person and you start to idolize them in a sense. All of a sudden you’re always hanging out or talking to them and you slowly begin to change your ideas, your thoughts, and sometimes your actions to match theirs so that they don’t judge you for what you’ve already always believed. You may tend to be afraid of acting up or say what’s on your mind in fear that they’ll make you feel small or weak for feeling the way you do. Sometimes it feels as if your problems are just irrelevant issues besides their own.
Those should have been the first red flags, but by the time you resurface yourself from the haze, you find yourself completely alone with no one to turn to because you had isolated yourself from the ones who truly cared from the beginning.
It always starts with them trying to help you see the truth you are blind to, but in the circumstance of things, you always fight back to further convince them they are wrong and to convince yourself that all your pain endured with this person will be worth the emotional strains in the end. Sometimes you even become angry and defensive about the situation as a result of the war raging in your head pulling you every which way, because deep down inside you know this is all wrong. Unfortunately, what eventually happens is those who care about us start distancing themselves little by little from us as they begin to feel powerless to even try to pull us out. They can’t stand to see us succumb to the abuse that soon, just like that, we lose them because we chose to neglect them to cater to the toxic.
Thinking about it all now, I always get frustrated with myself of how many great people I let slip away from my life just to make room for those who never deserved to be a part of mine to begin with. I regret how I wasted so much time and effort on people who never really gave as much as I did, who never really tried. It always hurts when I always end up surrounding myself with people who make me feel like I’m just a second rate person that doesn’t have high priority in life. It hurts even more when I realize that I did it to myself.
This can happen with any kind of relationship; a friendship, a romantic relationship, or between family members. Thankfully I’ve always had family be my rock, and they will always help talk me out of my mess. My own mother was the one who confirmed that one of my friendships was a sham after a “friend” recently visited me in Arizona for a week.
I never felt good enough around her, it always felt like she always turning everything around about her and when she was allowed to stress and take it out on me, I was not allowed to do the same. When she very well knew I was paying for everything because she didn’t have any money to help support our trip, I was told I was overreacting and making her feel bad for casually trying to keep things local instead of spending money on a $50 tank of gas that was used to drive two other people across town. Of course I caved and I took her to a concert two hours away in Tucson, bought two $25 tickets to see a band we both love, souvenirs for her trip home, and then food. That was just day one of five more.  My entire paycheck completely diminished in the timespan of a weekend and all she had to say as I drove her to the airport to see her off was; “at least you now know how it is to be a boyfriend.” I had never felt so used and stretched out…I hadn’t even really enjoyed myself. I didn’t have the heart in me to have another argument over how I felt how she treated me, so I let her get away with thinking I was okay. Those arguments were tiring and they had seemed to become routine ever since I moved away from Florida.
The final straw that shoved me out of my stupor was when she had singlehandedly used my worst insecurity against me…she told I was being clingy after I was just trying to check up on her. Clingy…that word. I wanted to break down and cry because she used it was so casually as if she didn’t know me at all. Perhaps she never really did. She became so mean and cruel over our text conversations that I just kind of stopped talking to her all together because I had nothing to say. I felt like I had stepped a boundary…and when I look at it that way, if there was even a boundary to cross…we were never really “best” friends.
I will not go without saying that I also was not the greatest friend. I often pushed her away when I felt like I would just get the generic comfort advice I didn’t want to hear, and when she would completely stomp on my problems or advice, I just decided to shut up and not talk at all. I found myself getting feisty and a little mean with her as I grew defensive and tired. In no ways will I say that I was innocent, because in the end I would say that I was also a toxic friend. Yes, I’ll admit I am pretty sensitive. Sometimes too sensitive…and I hate myself for it. But the fact that I felt like I was always on guard around her was finally too much to bear. I was my worst version of myself around her and I always threw in my problems in her face when she talked to me about hers because I felt like she only cared about her own and not mine. My insecurities got the best of me…
I had tried to justify our friendship in my head for so long, that I fought with all of me to try to maintain it. But it was no use, we were totally different besides the few things we had in common. We lived differently, and I was tired of hearing her bash me for my life routines because they didn’t coincide with hers. I always make my choices with people and consequences in mind, and she seemed to make rash decisions that meant that someone was to be hurt in the process. Regardless if she meant any of it or not, distance had gained me the perspective I needed to see that this was always meant to be temporary.
When I finally had the courage to let her go and tell her I couldn’t be friends with her anymore because we were both toxic for each other, she went off on me and turned it all on me as I knew she would. I guess I deserved it, I was a coward and waited till she confronted me before I said a word. But I didn’t throw any of her words back at her the way I could have and even though the acid was biting at the back of my throat so intensely to say something horrible, I held it back because I didn’t have the strength to fight back on something that shouldn’t be an argument. Plus, this person I had become was not who I wanted to be—synical, cruel, and hateful.
I do not hate her, never will I ever hate her. But if I forced myself to keep reigns on a dead friendship, I’d definitely be lying to both of us. That’s just as cruel.
I take my experience with her like another line in my painting, because I learned that what I needed in a best friend was not superficial interests like clothes, music, and aesthetics but an actual lifestyle and strong emotional understanding where we could be completely different but just the fact that we cared about each other and respected one another was more than enough than any other reason. I have friends like that, who I can still say till this day are the best friends I have ever had. I don’t even talk to them every day, but I know if something is going on in my life they would be more than happy to drop everything and hear me out without shoving their own problems down my throat. I can be me, and they can be them, and that’s perfect.
Our influence on others and theirs on us is very similar to what could happen to a small spark; one extreme is that you would fuel that spark with just enough gasoline to burn an entire forest down, while the other would be the spout of water to put it out. Even if it is just for a moment, we want to be that neutralizer. We want to be the comforting calm for those we care about. Especially for those like so many of us who already have a knack for feeling sad on our own, we don’t need an amplifier to our negative emotions. That would be miserable…to be torn down to nothing, over and over again, just to try to build ourselves back up. If you ask me, that’s exhausting and stands in your way of trying to better yourself. A positive person in your life will influence you to become your better self and to help lift you up so that you can grow and climb higher to do what you have the potential to do. It gives you the influence to do better for those who pick you up and you use their love as motivation to always try to move forward and help them in return. Those are our soul mates; the ones who will never make you feel alone; those are the ones that we should lose sleep for, because we know damn well they’d do the same for us.
I have every reason to believe that everyone who has crossed paths with us had a purpose to serve in our lives; those of who end up being the negative become our lessons in which we finally count all our blessings in the positive people who surround us. It also makes us appreciate so much more when we do finally feel just how easy it is to breathe when they don’t have a hold of us anymore.
So do the ones who matter, your life, and yourself a favor and let go of those who drag you down and make you feel any less amazing than you are. There is no one in this world that deserves to feel that they are worthless or invalid. Even if you start to fall back in that pattern again someday, I hope that you (as well as I) will have the strength and courage to remove ourselves from those relationships as soon as the warning signs begin to show themselves. You deserve nothing but the best people in your life, bringing us joy and vanishing our sorrow like a rainbow that stretches across the sky after a rainy day. Things do get better. Â (:
“Some people are like dark clouds, when they disappear, it’s a brighter day.”
 Just focus & keep aiming…
>>————– Avy —————–>
