This one is a self-esteem killer. I have become hard to be friends with. So hard, in fact, that I have mostly stopped trying. I am frustrating. I am unreliable. Not on purpose — but I have come to accept that on purpose is not the question other people are asking. Some of the friends I thought I would rock with for life have thrown up their hands and walked off. The walking-off makes sense to me. It does not feel good. But it makes sense.
This post is about that. Not the version where I make peace with being difficult. The version where I tell you what difficult looks like up close, and where I came by it.
I am an extreme introvert on top of being an abuse survivor. Would I have been this introverted without the abuse? I do not know. The two are knotted together in a way that twenty-plus years of trying to untangle has not undone. The fact is I am frequently unavailable — in mind, in body, in spirit. The older I get, the less energy I have. After graduate school I was still working through depression, and I was too tired to show up for my friends. I lost most of them during that time. Some of them stopped trying. Some of them I quietly stopped trying for. Both of those things were true at the same time, and I am not sure which one came first.
What little energy I have, I spend on my people.
My husband. My dogs. My mom. My auntie. My in-laws. That is the whole list. I do not have anything left for the rest of the world most weeks. I have made peace with the size of the list because I had to. The peace did not come quickly.
The harder thing nobody says
I have also become intolerant.
Not in some larger philosophical way. I am, in general, a low-drama person. I do not chase fights. But there are kinds of behavior I cannot make space for anymore, and the older I get the less I will pretend I can.
I had a friend I will call A. She was an abuse survivor too — a different version of the territory, same hard-won familiarity with the inside of it. We met when I went back to college for a bachelor’s in psychology. For a couple of years we were very close. I called her sister.
We went to graduate school together, and the friendship did not survive it. I started to notice that A. liked to start drama. With professors. With classmates. With anyone available. I sat through more than one incident I could not get behind. The one that broke it for me was a confrontation she initiated with an older woman professor — old enough that I would call her a senior — that crossed into open disrespect, in front of the entire class, in a way I could not stay seated through. My mama, who raised me from age eight to eighteen, taught me better than to participate in that.
A few months later A. asked me to lie for her. She made the ask after going radio silent for a stretch while she did a complete reversal on her husband — he had been her rock and was, suddenly, her enemy. I was done. I stopped taking her calls. I have not picked up since.
I want to be plain about this part: I cut off another abuse survivor. The survivor-supports-survivor framing — the unwritten rule that we who have been through it owe a kind of bottomless patience to anyone else who has been through it — was supposed to make that impossible. It did not. There are kinds of unwellness that come with being a survivor and there are kinds of behavior that come with being unwell — manipulation, asking other people to lie for you, attacking older women in public — and I have stopped pretending I owe the people who do those things a seat at my table. Not even the people I once called sister. Not even people whose pain I genuinely understand.
The shared territory does not require me to be in the room while they hurt other people.
That is the intolerance. It is part of why I am difficult.
What I am, as honestly as I can give it
I am intense. You can probably tell. I go places emotionally that most people get tired or turned off by. I do not hide my past — not in conversation, not on the page, not on this blog. I am respectful to my family, including the people I do not feel deserve it, because that is the kind of person Mama raised. But respect is not the same as pretending. I do not pretend about what I have been through.
If you are looking for rainbows and kittens, do not come to me.
If you are difficult too — if you have a five-person list, if you have lost friends you thought you would have forever, if you have cut someone off and felt the strange grief of doing the right thing — you know what I mean. Please leave a comment and share with the community.
— S. Solomon
If you are in crisis right now, the resources listed on the Contact page are faster than I am. In the United States, 988 (call or text) reaches the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, the International Association for Suicide Prevention maintains a list of helplines by country at https://iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/.
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