Honouring All Experiences

How many times do we feel despondent about something? Something happening to us, something not going the way we want or as quickly as we want. Not having enough and even the familiar not being enough. All these are experiences that should be honoured, but how?

I write this blog post inspired by my experience of someone I met back in 2019. Initially on meeting them, when I was in a dark place, I felt they had a great sense of who they were and such a positive happy outlook in life. However, I was overlooking the flags or I was simply seeing what I wanted to see.

As time elapsed I could clearly see a lot of fear in this person, fear of how they were perceived, fear of being controlled and this overwhelming fear of not being enough. Overall I now see a fear of actually living.

Looking back on myself in those moments with the person, I realise I spent most of my time with them observing their behaviour and trying to put myself in their shoes. Trying to understand what they ultimately wanted. I concluded many times that what they wanted from life was not what I wanted, but they felt so lost, I found it hard to step away from their blatant toxicity.

There was no way of convincing them on any significant level there was a positive to something happening out of their control. They ultimately came back to being down in the dumps with negativity. Often raging at or about people who were public figures. It amused me they shouted loudest about being locked down when they had nowhere to go either way. There definitely was no honouring anyone or anything in this particular mindset. Gratitude was often talked about but never felt, not truly not really.

The blunt aggression usually out of the blue or from a repeatedly wrongly perceived slight, the manipulation and the total inability to see the obvious fascinated me. How could one person with so few people in their life be so blind to their own hypocrisy? How can reality totally elude one person? I suppose if your only goal is to reach some sort of oblivion and you have no respect even for yourself then nothing appears as it actually is in life.

Saying you are something is the classic way of bringing to attention exactly what you are not. Even when things go the way you want, if you’re unhappy, which you obviously are, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way your software is running.

There’s definitely no question there is something terribly amiss if you have to criticise and belittle the wider population to make yourself feel happy and confident. Happiness and confidence built on the humiliation and judgment of other people is not true happiness and what confidence you feel is a self-fuelled illusion which dissipates as soon as you step out into the world.

Judging others is the common reaction to our own insecurities doing this over many decades makes it a chronic problem to say the least.

Unable to stop at one drink (one glass as opposed to a whole bottle of wine each time) is another issue. Probably one of the most constant relationships this person had in their life was one with alcohol. Siblings, parents, with whom there was no obvious conflict, could go without being seen days, weeks, months perhaps even years, but going a month without a drink was monumental. What does that tell you?

When you cannot feel the need to be there on days that are important to family who are there for you, do you really feel any affection, attachment, dare I say love? What I do say is dysfunctional. Irreversibly so.

When a social life is no different in or out of lockdown, then you know, you don’t really own the right to say you’re of happy go lucky outgoing nature. When the few relationships you have with actual people is constantly plagued with disagreements and the majority of what you think comes from comment sections on the internet, I will hazard a guess that we are not drawing from the same font of knowledge or information.

Finally I had to call it a day when it became absolutely painfully apparent, there was no change or growth in this person. They would be the same sad, fearful person who could not see what was of real value until the end. I found myself being used as a sole point of support, yet when I needed emotional support there was little they could give me as it just wasn’t in their capacity. Instead I was given material things. Material things are cold.

Maybe there’s too much fear that has been there for too long for there to be a way back to the happiness we all strive to feel from when we were children. I hope truly one day they will find happiness, but I also hope truly they don’t take other people down, like they tried to take me down, in pursuit of it.

I am not oblivious to the toxic energy I am channeling as I write this post. I have my defences in place as I recount the story and observations here. My true thoughts and feelings were never sought, again out of fear, because somewhere not quite so deep down, the person concerned has some abstract idea of what they are truly lacking.

Either way, no longer part of my orbit, but thank you for showing me what I don’t want to be and what I don’t need in my life. Thank you for showing me how wonderful my close friends and ex husband truly are. I honour the experiences I have had with you, I hope never to repeat most of them again. The lesson has been a valuable one. 🙏🏽