Friendship

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one”

C.S. Lewis And these are the friends I need in my life now - not those who want to ignore what has happened, not those who continue to make it happen in this generation - but rather those who have looked, have really seen, and have rejected the past to create a full and loving life in their new present.

When people show you who they are, believe them!

When people show you who they are, believe them!  -Maya Angelou

Oh, my goodness - how I need to learn this!!!!

Learning to be the real me

Whew.  So, I don't think I'm as nice as I thought I was - serving and pleasing people are not, as it happens, in my real nature at all - I'm really rather selfish and surly at times - and I'm OK with that for now!   I'm no longer happy to settle for relationships that are shallow and one-sided (That would be ME doing all the work and making things work out so everyone is happy - except me), If this is my life, then I get to live it the way I want to live it - and that means that I want relationships that are reciprocal - I get my needs met, too - and if that's too much for you, if you need me always to care for you while you can't be bothered to even keep in touch except when you need something, then that relationship is dead to me.  DEAD. TO. ME. There you have it!!!

OK, so I think I've gone from hurt to anger - and I'm probably going to be here for a while...

Courage

Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.

- Dumbledore in the fourth Harry Potter Book

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

- Winston Churchill

Ain't it the truth?

Sigh...

This whole process has been horrific, but the worst part is that I have to examine each and every other relationship that I have - really look at them and figure out how narcissism has affected these relationships... AACK!  Narcissism is like toxic chemicals - it can seep into all sorts of places and if you just accept toxicity in relationships, things can't get better.  It's odd not seeing the world though a toxic haze, but sometimes it just ain't pretty...  I really don't want this toxicity in my life anymore, but I've blindly accepted it for so long that it does seem like it's everywhere and some people that I thought were safe apparently aren't.  Sigh...

Our Rosita

In a little while, the vet is coming to put down our Rosie dog, who is almost 15 and has been a wonderful dog - not a particularly good dog, mind you, but a wonderful dog all the same.  She provided us lots of laughs with her bounding enthusiasm for life and her flat out refusal to fetch anything.  She's been an escape artist since we got her as a puppy from the pound.  Even at a few weeks old, she could climb paw over paw and escape from her cage.  She'd get to the top and just throw herself over - anything to get out!  When we tried to block her from the Christmas tree by putting a love seat across the door, she leapt it in a single bound.  She had odd little fears - balloons and plastic bags were near the top of the list - we said that she was part Chow, part Shepherd, and part chicken.  She didn't love other dogs-she tolerated small dogs but hated large dogs.  When she was happy, her tail would go up into a cute little curl and she always looked like she was smiling - and like she had just put on mascara.  She loved eggs - even into old age, an egg would make her jump around like a puppy.  Now she's arthritic and the medicine isn't really helping anymore.  She has diabetes insipidus and the medicine for that isn't doing much, either.  She's completely deaf (although she pretended to be most of her life...)' her eyesight is going, and she's begun to pace frantically around the house.  She gets lost in corners.  It's time...  Goodbye, dear Rosie - we'll miss you lots.

Nmother had no idea who I am

I was always amazed, when Nmother was alive,  how little she knew me - it was always difficult to believe that I lived in her house until I was 18 and she had absolutely no idea who I was or what I believed.  She seemed to make up who she thought I was - it seemed to have little to do with me, but more with what she needed me to be at any given moment.  She vacillated between thinking I was a liar and a compulsive truth-teller - the truth was somewhere in the middle as I was growing up, of course.  She sometimes thought I was smart and at other times accused me of being stupid - again, the truth was somewhere in the midst of that.  She accused me of being too religious and then too unbelieving - again, neither of those defined me, but it seemed that she sometimes needed me to be one way, sometimes the other.  And it had nothing to do with me - I was merely a prop in some drama she had going on in her head.  It was amazingly confusing, especially when I was a teenager, trying to figure out who I was and what I believed, to have the supposed adult defining me in various ways that made no sense. I got the oddest presents - picked out either by Nmother or WWW.  Sometimes we all got the same thing and sometimes I got what WWW wanted or liked - or something so obscure that I really had to wonder what it was.

And I wonder why it took me so long to figure out who I am - all those weird messages that had nothing to do with me...  Hmmmm...