I like to believe I’m a forgiving person. However, I admit I have a problem holding on to hurt. I try to let go, but clings to me, swells inside of me, haunts me. Sometimes, months, even years later, after I think I’ve forgotten all about some wrong, someone or something will trigger a memory and the hurt will come rushing back just as if it had happened only a moment ago and usually the pain is just as sharp and disabling and twisting and there’s anger and sorrow and frustration and it’s all so fresh and it won’t subside.
I’ve been learning a little bit about this Borderline Personality Disorder that the psychiatrist thinks I have and I think maybe this holding onto the hurt trait might be a part of it, though I don’t know how to overcome it.
It’s almost always about a betrayal, a perceived personal wrong of some sort, of some varying level. It’s always about friendship, about need, about acknowledgement. Often it’s about needing the other person or persons to accept some responsibility in the wrongness — it can’t always be all my fault.
Years and years ago, I was in a co-dependent friendship and she was pushing me away because she had met a boy, which I didn’t approve of because — well — she was married, but she was spending quite a bit of time with the new boy and in my desperation to keep my friend, I was trying to cling to the friendship and I would complain that she was not spending much time with me. One night in a fight of rage, she told me that the only reason she had been friends with me the last 3 or 4 years was because she’d pitied me the same way she’d pitied the pathetic 45 year old man who’d started stalking her when she was teenager.
I only spoke to her a few times, mostly at social gatherings over the next few years. I do think she finally apologized for that. During the intervening years however, the memory haunted me, bothered me. Every time I thought of that moment, that argument, that night, it felt as if a red hot knife were twisting in my heart. My best friend in the whole world had compared me to a pedophile who eventually ended up marrying a mail-order Russian bride, had basically said that I could only make friends who pitied me, that I was a sad, pathetic creature she had used for 3 or 4 years until someone better had come along.
The thing is that in those years, I had better friends, friends that didn’t use me, that didn’t expect me to be at their beck and call, that didn’t make me feel bad about myself. I had plenty of friends who were interested in doing a variety of things and going to a variety of places and trying a variety of things.
But the hurt was still there underneath.
And she did two other things in those years that to this day bother me…mostly because they remain unresolved. First, she called me up about six or seven months after I stopped talking to her and told me that she had cancer, but she didn’t want anyone else to know about it. She said that it was really bad and that she was going through all kinds of treatments. On several later conversations with me, she made references to this treatment. However, when I saw her at the social circles’ Christmas party a couple months later, she looked and acted physically fine. She did not appear to be having any kind of side affects to chemo or drug treatments and since I was at the time going through the process of watching another friend, who she did not know, deal with Lung Cancer from Chemo, drug therapy and finally the removal of half a lung, I was keenly aware of what to watch for. Years later when she called me to tell me her husband had left her and could we have dinner and talk, I remember during that conversation she distinctly commented that the most expensive hospital bill she ever had was when she’d flipped over her bicycle and spit her chin open back right after high school — no mention of cancer was ever made again and certainly, she never told anyone else in our social circle.
The other thing that has bothered me off and on, though a little less so lately, is that a few months after we stopped speaking that time, a friend of mine from work had gone into the grocery store that she worked and was the supervisor of one of the departments. My friend came to me the next day very upset because she’d overheard my then ex-friend talking to one of her co-workers about me, telling him obvious and ridiculous lies. I had once upon a time worked in that grocery store and still shopped there on occasion. My co-worker shopped there because that locally-owned store had an excellent bakery for diabetics; however, they lost a customer that day, which is why I suppose you should be careful who you talk about in public when you work in the service industry.
That she told those ridiculous lies used to be like an extra stab in the heart to me and even after we started talking again, I would think about that and let the anger swell and just dwell on it. However, the last month or so, it occurred to me that it wasn’t fair to her to be angry at her for it, because I never told her that I knew. Maybe she’d be sincerely sorry if she knew?
The truth is that we are friends again. Last year, I went to England to be Maid of Honor (again) at her wedding. This time around I’ve decided not to forget what she’s capable of because that wasn’t the first time she’d betrayed me, to be aware of the possibility, to set limits. It took time to get back to this place where we can trust each other, but to be honest, when I really needed her three years ago at the darkest time in my life, she was actually there for me, and I like to think that when she needed me, when her first husband left, I was there for her, despite the hurt that was still sitting deep inside.
To be continued…
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