relationships – Page 2

It’s certainly been an interesting few weeks for me. Interesting is probably a tepid way of describing the last few days. But it’ll do for now.

I’ve always valued telling it like it is, but at the same time, I’ve always erred on the side of very polite, very cautionary, socially accepted discourse. I am, after all, the daughter of my mother, who has always had the gift of utterance – she always knew how to say things in a way that fit the situation. She never failed to try to teach her children the value of saying the right things at the right time, in the right way so that the intended message was delivered correctly (she often wrote speechers for government officials – even for the president of the Philippines once, so yeah, she knew what she was doing!).

I remember having a no-holds-barred conversation with a friend (who sadly is no longer a close friend) and I let it rip – I said exactly what I thought, in exactly the way I thought I should say it. And I hurt them. I know our friendship was never the same after that and we never recovered. I learned a valuable lesson that day – gauge your audience and adjust. It’s the sensible, sensitive, and considerate thing to do.

It’s also such a limiting way to live your life. But it’s living within the social mores. The adult way of colouring within the lines.

My communication style in relationships has also fallen into rhythms in pretty much the same way. Especially in the most important of my relationships. I had to adjust how I said things so that the people I was speaking to understood what I was saying. I know you’re meant to be able to say what you want how you want to say it to the people who are meant to know you best. But it wasn’t exactly how it worked out for me. I found myself walking on eggshells and walking the emotionally-charged verbal tightrope with my most important relationship. I know that relationships are two-way streets and it should always be a bipartisan effort but let’s be honest, it’s not always a 50-50 work split in relationships. Someone always does more work, is more considerate, bends backward more, and it’s not usually the person who thinks they’re the ones who do this. My fault is that I do jump with two feet into relationships – I love (or become involved) so completely that I put everything of myself in relationships and I fully immerse myself into being who they need (because maybe I subconsciously hope they’re doing the same for me). I wrap myself around the person and be who they want me to be because I want to make them happy in the way they make me happy. In healthy relationships, the other person will want you to be who you are, they will see who you really are and not who they want you to be, and they want you to show them who you are so that you grow together. I don’t think all my relationships were necessarily healthy. Or more specifically, some of the people I was in relationships with weren’t necessarily in a space to contribute to a healthy relationship, or want to work on having a healthy, well-rounded relationship. But there you go. Hindsight is always 20-20.

I’ve been reacquainting myself with who I am again…or at least who I was before this last relationship imploded. Whether correctly or incorrectly, I’ve decided that my case of arrested development stems from my being involved in this relationship – I stopped being who I was and growing into the person I was meant to be because I became the person that I thought this relationship needed me to be. But that’s all changed now, I think. I’m relearning to say no when it serves me, when I think I need to say no because whatever is happening doesn’t sit well with me. I’m relearning the boundaries that I actually have and I’m reassessing whether they are actually where they need to be or whether I can stretch them. I’m actually having fun reacquainting myself with who I am.

And because I am getting to know myself again, I am (re)learning my quirks. I am still polite, I will always try to be diplomatic about things, and I will probably always try to be what people need me to be in relationships – because that’s who I am. But I think at the same time. I have actually started to take steps back when things aren’t right for me. I’ve actually said no several times when my hard limits were reached. I’ve also learned to not give too much of myself now. I used to overcompensate but now I think I’m learning to match the energy that I’m being served. It’s all a work in progress and I’m all about the WIP these days.

What hasn’t changed though is my overthinking. It’s exhausting and I know it’s something I need to work on. I still think it’s a superpower (yes, probably flawed reasoning!) because I know it’s protected me from a lot of situations – I’ve been able to mentally prepare myself for heartache and disappointment because I’ve overthought situations to death or it’s allowed me to be good at my job because I’ve considered every possible scenario, or it’s just allowed me to think of permutations so I’m prepared for most things (yes, I accept that overthinking is not good, but I think I’ve survived well on this planet because of this, so this will be difficult to manage!).

So trust me, I may smile, I may pretend to be confused or ditsy or inept (and to be fair, with the brain fog that I go through some days, this might be more genuine than you think!), I may say the polite thing and say okay, but I know when I’m being managed, because I’ve overthought everything (twice!).

I would rather hear the truth, receive the critique, be told off than dance the polite dance and get platitudes. It doesn’t serve anyone.

I have deliberately held off writing on the blog for a long time because I was dealing with a personal struggle. I know myself well enough to know that if I allowed myself to write about the experience before I’d processed it, the entry would become a rant. That was the last thing I wanted to do because I needed to understand how I was feeling and why I was feeling what I was feeling. Cryptic enough?

I was going through a period of self-doubt and I was asking myself a lot of questions that demanded a lot of self-honesty, looking at myself in the mirror very critically, a lot of soul-searching and I was praying a lot about a decision that I’d made. I felt torn between deeply regretting having to act on the decision, and knowing, with absolutely certainty, that what I’d done was the, really, the best course of action.

I’ve never really known how to cut myself off from people who affect me negatively. I always thought that holding on and not giving up on relationships meant that you cared about the person. I always thought that if I continued to treat the person in the way I wanted to be treated, it would eventually lead to them doing the same thing. I was, also, never a quitter. I never gave up on things, tasks, and most especially people. I am a Christian, with my faith so steeped in my life and my psyche that it was difficult to switch off the “not giving up on people” because God never gave up on me. So stepping away was not an option.

Also, I can’t remember where I learned it, whether I heard it from someone or I read it somewhere -that what you despise in others is what you hate in yourself. I wondered whether in this situation, it was the case? I had to ask myself that several times. Was the negativity I was feeling a reflection of how I was feeling about something in my life.

I kept asking myself, what lesson was I supposed to learn from this experience?

After all that thinking, praying, reading and soul-searching, I came to the conclusion that I needed to learn to look at the unhealthy patterns in certain relationships and learn to put a stop to it. To learn to extricate myself from the situation so that I would be set free – from the negativity, from the unkind thoughts, from the self-doubt, from the annoyance. My response to this negative situation was eating away at me. I didn’t like how I was reacting.

I was struggling to find what the Christian response was to this situation. Then I read something that Debbie McDaniel wrote. She said: “God’s greatest desire is to set us free…and what propels that change is for some brave soul to be willing to say “Stop, no more.” One who will choose what is better…and set boundaries.” Because, in the end, if you remove yourself from the situation, the negativity stops, the unchristian thoughts stop. Because in the end, sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind…to everyone, including yourself.

Maybe one day, when the opportunity presents itself, I will tell this person how much their behaviour has affected me. Because I believe authentic relationships require honesty.

One day, maybe.

Until that day comes, I will tell myself that I did what I could in my position. And while it is still a challenge, I am going to have to forgive myself for walking away. Because at the end of the day, I wanted to stop myself from being mean and unkind, if not in deed, it was certainly in thought. For now, that will have to be enough.