Closing doors

I’m a generally insecure person.

Even after all of the internal work I’ve done in the last 4 or 5 years, I still carry around the baggage of feeling like I’m too much, much of the time.

My attachment style might be considered co-dependent. I need to feel needed.

Yet at the same time, I’m also fiercely independent and am trying to teach my kids to be the same.

Paradoxes are my love language, apparently.

Except maybe, when it comes to friendship.

I consider myself to be an incredibly loyal friend. If you’re in my circle, I’m always here for you. I will reach out and ask how you’re doing when something seems off. I will text you just to say hello, in case you need a smile. I will bake you cookies without being asked, show up for your tennis matches, or help you with a presentation at 6:30am. I will be your therapist, your partner-in-crime, your dinner date, or your professional collaborator.

If you are my friend, I have your back.

So what hurts me the most…and has happened a few times lately…is when it feels like other people don’t have mine.

I get that everyone has a thousand different things going on in their lives. And maybe answering my text isn’t really at the top of their priority list. Maybe I’M not at the top of their priority list. Logically, it makes sense. We all have only so much physical time and emotional capacity to hold space for other people.

What if the problem isn’t that other people don’t hold ENOUGH space for me, but that I hold TOO MUCH space for them? (It always comes back to “too much,” sigh.) And because of that, I expect the same in return.

Reciprocation, I guess.

But expecting something of others is always naive. And usually leads to getting hurt.

A (real) friend said to me the other day, “when people show you who they are, believe them.”

Maybe I am still clinging onto the idealistic image I have about some of the people in my life — the best version of them that I know exists — because it’s too painful when they show me that their “best version” isn’t actually for me.

This is a thing I need to learn to accept, though. That just because I can see the goodness in someone, doesn’t always mean I have access to it. And that just because I am opening myself up to them, it doesn’t mean they’re obligated to open themselves back.

Maybe I need to be more protective of my energy, and more discerning about who I really consider a friend.

Closing those doors feels losing a part of myself, though. Maybe it’s a part that was never mine to begin with.