I don't come here much anymore. Ever since about a year and some-change ago when my life went off-the-rails I haven't had much of a drive to use this platform because it hurt. Truth be told it still does, but I feel possessed to say where I am with all this now.
About a year ago I was living with a roommate. We met a year prior to moving in and the friendship moved pretty quickly. We generally had lots of fun living together and going on adventures, but at some point things became evidently not so good, and we had a falling out that caused me to move out and for us to stop speaking.
For the longest time I couldn't really understand it. I was angry, I was hurt, I felt betrayed and mistreated and downright traumatised. I also felt guilty and ashamed for things I had done. It seemed like no matter what I did it only moved to make things worse. By the end of things we wouldn't even speak and generally avoided interaction, largely facilitated by me, where I was just too upset to really communicate without having a breakdown.
In the time since then I've gone out on my own, found myself a new life, and done what I can to move forward while also trying to get better and to understand what really happened. My therapist and I discussed it week after week, again and again as I continued evaluating and learning. At my lowest, I couldn't speak their name, listen to their name, visit that part of town, enjoy things they enjoyed (music, games, television) or even really go about my day without falling apart. Over time I started to push through that, first travelling through their neighbourhood instead of taking long detours to avoid it. Then I began to reclaim music, and then activities, and so on. On Halloween I began speaking their name again, screaming "Fuck You XXXXXXX" at the top of my lungs from the bridge I was stopped on, since I didn't make it to the cemetery after my show. It was about a month later I began to realise that my perception of the situation was warped, and that I had painted them as a super bad person to the friends around me. I considered everything we had shared, what we had done, and the fun we had. I was hurting bad, and it was largely me realising they weren't some evil boogeyman who set out to ruin me.
I continued looking inward as things continued. By the time December rolled around I was pretty high strung, as we had agreed to check in a year after the split. The day came and went without word, and I made peace that they either forgot, didn't care, or didn't want to talk to me. The holidays came and I found myself doing something they had shared with me as a tradition for the cold season; dancing in the snow to AFI's "Kiss And Control" as well as a few other songs that had hurt until then, like "Vampires Will Never Hurt You" by My Chemical Romance, which is a song we would sing together often and has generally put a pit in my heart ever since. I began to humanise them again, and I missed them despite the burning hurt in my heart.
Through that I found myself with a different friend, watching them feign ignorance about their behaviour, cry that they ruined everything they touched, detonate relationships, upset everyone, and generally have little regard for the emotional well-being of others in favour of their own. The frustration of this led me to discuss it with my therapist. It was in that moment I realised I understood that friend because I had been that friend, and that I was now in the role of my old friend and roommate in trying to maintain a relationship with someone who wa hurting me. This moment clicked in my brain loudly and abruptly.
In my efforts to get better and grow, my drive to become emotionally intelligent and aware of how my actions affect others, I had finally realised what *really* happened with that roommate a year ago, and it is happening to me right now from the other side. I understand now that the roommate and once friend of mine was not being malicious or hateful when they stopped talking to me, or when the living situation got tense, they were a normal person doing their absolute best to maintain a relationship with someone who was emotionally volatile due to trauma and an anxious attachment style. Everything I viewed as acts to hurt me were actually acts to be my friend safely that I was blinded to by my own condition at the time.
I spent a year filled with pain, regret, and resentment for somebody I perceived as abandoning me, and in a single moment it became clear that everything they did was out of love and a desire to protect us both. They weren't trying to hurt me, they were helping me. Everything is clear now.
It's been a few hours since I realised all this, and I'm still digesting it all, but something in my heart tells me it's time soon to reach out and thank them, and let them know that I understand now what was going on in 2023. Im sitting on it to decide, and steeling myself if they respond poorly, but ultimately I feel like I finally have the answers I was looking for in terms of what happened between us.
You won't read this, but if you do
Thanks, you'll be hearing from me soon. I've missed you.
