Sunday

I just emailed a friend of mine who badly betrayed me all of last year.  He completely ceased communicating with me, even when I made it clear I wanted to talk to him.  This would have been understandable – if I had done something hurtful to him.  But I hadn’t, which made it so much worse.  And I was singled out – it wasn’t like he stopped talking to other mutual friends of ours.  None of them could find out why he was doing this to me.  He emailed me sometime later last semester, asking to talk to me.  I waited for awhile to contact him – partly because I just didn’t want to deal with it, and partly out of selfishness.  I wanted him to feel what it’s like to be completely ignored by a good friend.  It was like he had died, but worse because it was by choice.

So that whole situation has been very emotionally jarring, and I hope we can gain some sort of mutual understanding about how the other is feeling and their motivations.  Eventually I hope to be able to trust him again, but after all that has happened, that is going to be a long process.

I often feel betrayed by people, and I don’t know what I do to bring this on.  My roommate situation last semester was incredibly difficult and hurtful, and I still do not – and probably will never – understand why it was like it was.  I am coming to an acceptance that everyone is not nice, and that some people get off on making others feel shitty.  There have been few instances in my life that made me feel as bad as living with those girls last semester did.  I just found out that one of them deleted me from her facebook friends – how petty.  Again, all of this would have made sense if I actually DID something nasty to them, but I don’t do mean things and I am generally considered a nice person.

Honestly, I think one of my flaws is that I’m too nice – to the extent that some people feel that they can use me as a doormat.  I have had this problem throughout my life, especially over the last three years or so.  When I met the boys at the end of high school, they relentlessly made fun of me – which was fine until it became just too much.  It is because I just laugh it off and am so nice about it that people think they can do what they want.  If I had become a bitch to those girls last semester, instead of just fruitlessly trying to appease them, they would have at least become less intimidating.  I was ALWAYS so damn nice to them, and they treated me like shit.  I wasn’t the best roommate ever – I didn’t spend endless hours cleaning the place – but they are notoriously OCD about cleaning and my behavior did not warrant their awful treatment of me.  From Day 1, I felt excluded without a cause.

Now some people who I once considered good friends are not responding to my efforts to reach out to them, and this hurts me, too.  Sometimes I think that other people just move on a lot easier than I do.  I don’t switch friends very much, which is probably something I should work on.  I am really good at making acquaintances, but when it comes to actually making friends – you know, those people you would call at 4 a.m. for anything – I fall short.  It is really hard to make that leap from casual acquaintance to good friend, and honestly I don’t know how a lot of the people closest to me came to be that way.

Basically, I am instinctively very trusting of people, but because of various situations and baggage I am starting to become less so.  I am starting to accept that there are people I will just never get along with, and whose motives I will never understand.  There are people who are so different from me that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to be friends.  People who are crueler than I could ever be.

I could never ignore a friend pleading to talk to me.  I could never look someone in the eyes and tell her she’s not invited, and that some people “just aren’t meant to be friends”.  I could never make fun of someone to the point that they are about to break down.

All of this has happened to me, and I’m sure there are more awful things, too.  All of this plus more is the reason why I tend to be afraid of people.  That doesn’t mean I sit in my room alone all the time – I love meeting people, I love parties, I love just hanging out and shooting the breeze.  But for me, there is always a fear that I won’t be accepted, that people will shut me out, exclude me, or not like me.  I watch D socialize and I admire how he says what he wants, without worry that others will reject it or him.  It is truly me who is the introvert, although many people would say otherwise.  When push comes to shove I know what to say, I know how to be friendly, and I know how to put people at ease.  But it’s getting up the nerve to say anything at all that is tough sometimes.  It used to be a lot worse, and it is rare these days that I have to remind myself to actually participate in conversations.  When I do speak up, people usually like what I have to say.  But it’s that fear of “what if?” that sometimes keeps me quiet.  That realization that sometimes people are cruel that stops me from saying what I want to say.

I need to go get ready for my Humane Society orientation.

Em