Winnowing the Chaff

This was something that I wrote and published to the Writings section of Facebook, years ago. I stumbled across it today, and decided that this was a good forum to post it anew. Shall we step into the time machine?

October 24, 2009

"Put aside relationships that are unfulfilling".

This was a one-liner from my 'Faith and Religion' discussion group from way back when, but it continues to strike a chord with me. I'm sure we all have the kind of relationships that we feel are more draining than fulfilling. But what do we do about it?

Well, I suppose it depends on the type of relationship; How much time, energy and how much of yourself you've poured into it, and the degree of drainage; How much damage you feel is being done to you mentally, emotionally, physically or even financially- though I tend to think that last one is more a final straw, and of less import. For instance:

I cut ties with an Ex that I had been with for 7 years, living together for 4 years, and still friends for a year after that. It took me the last two years of the relationship to figure out that to be happy, I had to walk away. Away from 4 years of routine, 7 years of dedicating myself to him. Away from most of my friends, away from home, hearth, and family. I left him and the North behind and started anew here in Hamilton. It took me another year to figure out that even being friends with him was still draining me mentally and emotionally. It took my mom giving me a lecture that I have given friends in the past, to finally cut all ties.

It's a good feeling not to panic every time the phone rings...

I recently cut ties with two friends who, after numerous times of throwing my friendship in my face, apologising, and then doing it again a few weeks/days down the road, I finally decided that it wasn't worth crying guilty tears. After all, it's not my fault that they can't accept the help given them, the help they've asked for.

I feel lighter for the loss, and yet, part of me still feels guilty, like I didn't do enough...

At a point in my mom's lecture, she tried to tell me to stop feeling guilty. That I am obviously a good person, but that I have to stop blaming myself for these failed relationships. I had developed the mentality that I was failing as a friend, not giving enough of myself to the relationships, even though, in truth, I tend to pour too MUCH of myself into my relationships. Mom said that while this is proof that I am such a good person, it is what makes me to vulnerable to heartache.

Is it just me, or do we 'good people' often end up the victims of relationship leaches? How many people are draining you? And why are you still letting them? For me, it is because I feel I owe them something. But when I stop to think about what, or why.... Why should I feel I owe  my continued support and friendship to someone who is causing me nothing but misery and continue to throw said friend ship in my face?

It's my nature, I suppose. I want to help everyone.

I often quote Scripture or Poetry when I rant like this. So here's a couple of  bits of poetry for our food for thought for today:

"The hardest things to hear, are those you always say,
When looking for advice, your own is hardest to take."

and-

"Worse that taking without giving,
Is giving without taking.
As the takers grow stronger,
The givers give themselves away."

And the ironic thing? I'm the Poet.

Mental Health: II

During the last two years of my first relationship, it was a known fact that I was miserable. However, I was also comfortable. I knew what every day would bring. I am not a person who thrives on change. In that time, there were several conversations about where I would go, what I would do. The where, was always to the Hamilton Boy. We'll call him D, for simplicity's sake.

D was my second long term, common law relationship. I had known him through the entire seven years of my previous relationship, having met him through a friend. She in turn, had met him at a Christian Youth Retreat. We became fast friends via the Internet, sending instant messages, emails, the occasional web cam chat, and even letters. I connected with him on a level that I had never connected with anyone, other than family.

We had many things in common. He had younger siblings, he had grown up largely in Small Town, Southern Ontario, he loved to read, and he was a Gamer. D was also an artist, and a computer tech and programmer.

In the two and a half years that we were together, we were equal parts blissfully happy and devastatingly miserable. As has become my pattern, I tried to stick with it, even when it had devolved to misery.

Many of you will be thinking that it was the 'Honeymoon Phase'. If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, the man I had fallen in love with was Bi-Polar, and borderline schizophrenic. And yes, I knew this from the start. Go ahead, yell at the monitor and shake your head at me. I'm sort of used to it by now.

About a year after we got together, we decided he needed to quit his job. His boss had a health problem that was causing him to be harsh, demanding and unreasonable with his staff and D was coming home everyday more and more pissed off. It was beginning to wear on our relationship. I had just started working full time at the Café, and was fully capable of supporting the pair of us on my minimum-wage-plus-tips income. After all, I had spent 4 years running a household on just that which also included insurance and gas for the vehicle. D and I had no such expenses to worry about. If anything, I was in fact ahead of the game in this scenario.

He quit his job, and things were better. He was excited to be focusing on his art and his computer tech and programming, even registering his own business. He even had a couple of road trips to nearby towns for a few days at a time to do technical work. But things weren't going as quickly as he'd have liked. I was still the breadwinner. His male ego just couldn't handle it. Thus he began a majour bout of depression.

My first relationship was strife with very loud, long and drawn out arguments, not because I was the sort not to let things go (in fact, back then I was largely anti confrontational), but because my partner (let's call him A) was the sort that argued as a way to relieve stress. He would literally change his position on whatever we were discussing until our conversation eventually devolved into an argument. He would then push my buttons until I raised my voice. The arguments often wouldn't end until I was crying myself sick in a corner. It was at this point that he would come to his senses and apologise. No matter how many times it happened, I couldn't see to stop before then, and he wouldn't stop until then. Looking back, I honestly think that he was sadistic, and while he may feel some remorse for what it was doing to me, his guilt did not outweigh his need for that rush of power that he got from turning an otherwise strong girl into a simpering puddle of jelly.

Because of what I had gone through with A, I took my anticonfrontationalism to new heights. In his depressed state, D was the sort of person who, when I tried to have a calm, rational discussion about something that I thought was a point of contention between us, he would automatically get defensive and make himself out to be the victim of an attack. The minute he raised his hackles, and his voice, I would drop it. And so all of the little things that come up between a couple could not be dealt with, were simply swept under the emotional carpet. As a result, he grew more and more distant as his own mental health declined, and I just kept going though the motions.

I remember the moment that I realised that it was over. He was walking around in the living room in nothing but a pair of Atari PJ pants. There was something about the way they clung to his frame that always lit a fire within me. I had always had a bit of an over active libido, so as I sat there watching him, and feeling nothing, no stir, no spark, no heat, I knew. I looked up at him, eyes deadpan, and told him so.

He looked crestfallen. It was the first time I had seen any emotion other than irritation on his face in well over a month. He even teared up. He sat down on the couch and we held each other as we talked about it. We should have ended it right there. We should have laid our frayed relationship to rest. But we loved each other so much. We wanted to try to make it work.

He professed that he wanted to fix things. To make it up to me. But he was setting me up. He just wanted to find a way to make it my fault, or at least that's how it seems now. Whether this was his intention or not, is largely besides the point now. The damage was done. For five months, he dragged me through the gutters, blaming me for everything as he became more and more delusional. We would kiss and make up, and he would forget, and go right back to being vexed with me.

One day at the end of April, he got pissy about something, again forgetting that we had made up, and when I tried to actually address the issue, he turned around and drove his fist through the wall behind me.

Now I may be the kind of idiot who will allow long term mental and emotional abuse to the point of brainwashing, but I will not stand for physical abuse. I went from the jelly spined creature that I had become over the years of abuse from A and then D, to the iron willed, empowered woman that my mother had always hoped I would be. He was told in no uncertain terms that this would be the last time I put up with his circular bullshit. The next time that he 'forgot', I was packing his shit and he was going to his mother's.

A couple of weeks later, while he was at his mother's over mother's day weekend to help plant some flowers in the garden, it happened again. He must have known I would end it, then. He avoided my phone calls, my texts and my emails. I wanted to speak to him over the phone to be sure that it sunk in that we were over. Instead, I received a scathing email from him, telling me what a horrible human being I was, and all of the reasons that he was ending it. Most of which were complete fabrications of his delusional state.

Needless to say, I shot off a response thanking him for painting me as the monster and told him he really needed to get his head on straight. Agreed that it was over, and told him I would have his things packed in time for a friend to drop them off to him.

Ending that relationship was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Leaving A was just a matter of realising that I was no longer in love with him and that I could only grow as a person by leaving him and leaving my comfort zone. But I was still very much in love with D. For the first time in my life, I suffered a truly broken heart.

Spiritual Health: I

Have you ever been hungry to the point where you feel like you're wasting away but nothing seems appetising? Nothing seems like it could possibly fill the void?

I've spent the better part of my adult life feeling something like that.

My parents were never what you would call religious. My Dad ruled the home with an iron fist and filled it with books and learning,  Mom guided us through our emotional ups and downs and taught us the fundamentals of how to live independent lives, and they both taught us to respect the world around us. The closest thing to Christ we had in our home was the birch bark Nativity scene that the neighbours gave us one year shortly after we moved North.

I had an aunt and uncle that were catholic, and they used to take me to church, when I was just wee, and to my uncle's despair, I would sing along with the hymns at the top of my lungs. I don't remember this, but it's one of my favourite stories. Love you, Uncle G. *innocent grin*

Later, I had friends who attended church. A difficult thing to avoid in Small Town, Northern Ontario. I mostly remember the singing. It wasn't until I was in high school that I started attending church on a somewhat regular basis. I spent most weekends at my best friend's house and her family attended church every Sunday. Theirs was a branch of the Good Shepherd Church, as, it happens, was the one other friend with whom I attended church around age 11.

Good Shepherd was a good place for me to get my feet wet with the whole God/Christ thing. Unfortunately, I stopped attending after a particularly poor move on the part of the pastor. He offended a lot of people that day, and I was simply too young to forgive him and give him a second chance. I never went back.

My first boyfriend, later fiancé, was a Jehovah's Witness. Well, his parents were, anyway. He and I used to have some interesting conversations about the Bible. And I'd even have similar conversations with his parents from time to time.

It's funny, but it wasn't until I walked away from a 7 year relationship and hit the bottom of my emotional well that I actively sought the Church. I was working at a small café in Middle of Nowhere, Southern Ontario, and a group of ladies started coming in for early tea before the lunch crowd trickled in. On their third visit, they finally approached me with The Good Word. Turns out that they, too, were JW's...

Now, I should mention, here, that I have a very biased opinion of JW's. In my eyes, the embody everything that is wrong with Christianity. I'm not saying this to start a debate, I just think it's important in order to understand the progress of my Walk. Anyway, back to my story...

Something made me actually listen to what they had to say instead of just politely declining. And the next thing I knew, I was agreeing to a Bible study every morning before the café got busy. At a time when I had just walked away from my life, my home, and was even temporarily estranged from my family, this was exactly what I needed. Between those ladies and their Bible Study, my new boyfriends, and  the wonderful woman for whom I was working, I managed to find my feet again, to reach out and regain my life, find new friends and a new support system, and even find the patience to wait out the storm until I could go back to the arms and lives of my family.