Another Brick in the Wall

Six or so years ago, when I was going through a very rough period in my life, a woman who’d basically been through hell and back, stepped up to the plate to help me out with very wise words and a whopping dose of reality.

One of the things I learned at that time, and have pretty much lived by from that point on, was that nine times out of ten, when someone tells you something they don’t like that you’re doing, about how you’re acting, or just who you are, it’s because they have the expectation that you should change to suit their wants and needs because you made them feel ‘bad, ugly, upset, angry, sad, etc.’.

The bottom line to this element of learning was that I need to take responsibility for what I do and IF I was going to tell someone how their words or actions affect(ed) me, I have to have an outright and clear self-knowledge that I'm doing it to get it off my chest, not with the expectation of change from them. They can opt to change because they want to and/or because they don’t like it whatever it is they were doing, saying, etc., but have never put that into so many words. Or, they can change just to suit my (or someone else's) expectations of them, which usually leads to resentment and anger on their part towards me (or someone else).

I took that lesson to heart, If I tell someone that I’m finding certain elements about them/our relationship wrong, I will most always preface it with the fact that I’m just getting it off my chest or in a more dire circumstance, let it be known that those are the reasons I need to step back from the relationship to reassess whether or not I think it works for me. I don’t ask for or expect any sort of change. I hope that they might come about--either via them changing what they're doing or me learning to accept them for who and what they are at that particular time.

Many times I won’t say anything because experience has taught me that it tends to get me nowhere---and that it’s much wiser to just determine, over time, whether or not I can contend with whatever the issue might be.

This isn’t a problem when there are one or two or even three fairly innocuous items that bug you—those can be dismissed or avoided fairly easily without detriment to the relationship. Sometimes they’re one off situations that aren’t repeated, so they’re not worth discussion. Sometimes they can simply become ‘off-topics’—things you just don’t do or discuss with that person.

But, when those dismissals, avoidances, and ‘off-topics’ start piling up in numbers and create the equivalent of a shoddily built brick wall, then there's a serious problem at hand. The bricks are stacked haphazardly with nothing in between to cement them together. The wall, over time, becomes pock-marked, chipped, cracked, and wobbly---and sooner or later a large portion or the whole thing comes tumbling down because the foundation of it wasn’t really ever there to keep it solid and in place.

In relationships this can take days, weeks, months, even years…and it happens in a LOT of relationships, whether we want to believe it or not. It doesn’t just have to be romantic relationships—it can easily happen with friends, family, even co-workers.

Conversely there are those friendships that regardless of a few chips and cracks, stand the test of time. There are mutual interests, common bonds, and similar outlooks that cause the rest of the wall to stand intact and allow the people involved to nurture and tend to the wall. These things provide the mortar to keep the bricks stable.

We all have a couple of them that fall into this category. And THESE are the ones in which we have to look at to base the others on. What about these relationships works? What makes them so solid?

Personally, I have three of these relationships, outside of family members. And the same thing holds true for all three of them: Effort and initiative is taken on both sides, fairly equally. E-mails, phone calls, IMs, and invitations are generated by me and the other person—not every day, sometimes not even every week or every month, but there is always an effort by both sides. Sometimes it’s merely to say hi, sometimes it’s to discuss the world around us, sometimes it’s to get things off our chests about our lives…but the communication is there and both sides have taken responsibility for it. And when it comes to actual invitations—they’re for real. Not just some tentative suggestion to get together in the future. Plans are made, solidified, and stuck on the calendar. Sure, sometimes they get changed due to circumstances, but overall, the plans happen because both sides felt it was important enough to make that time in their schedule without being wishy-washy or excuse ridden about it.There's an ebb and flow to these relationships because there's an ebb and flow to how up and down or lives can be, but they always go back to being stabilized within a fairly short amount of time.

For an impatient girl like me, waiting to see how much degradation that relationship ‘wall’ can withstand is highly anxiety-inducing (doesn’t help when one has an anxiety disorder to make this that much worse), especially when I’m trying to ignore my gut instinct and try to just ‘buck up little camper’ about a relationship. But, one other thing I learned is that you can bring other things into the equation to determine if that wall will crumble or if it will continue standing strong. How much time are you, and you alone, willing to spend tending to it over the long-haul? How does it compare to the ‘strong’ relationships in your life? How much equality based effort, energy, and time is being expended back at you? Those things determine how sturdy that wall really is…and it takes a bit of rational thought and logic to look at the big picture to determine if you want to stand there when the wall falls, if the wall can be shored up, or if it’s best to walk away before it drops on your head.

I recently made the decision to walk away from a wall that was pretty damn wobbly. The question I got most about it was ‘why did this come about so suddenly’. When I look back on things, it didn’t---those cracks and holes have been getting bigger and bigger for many months and I was just trying to ride it out. I was trying to salvage as much of the wall as I could without taking a sledgehammer to it and causing it’s demise. Many of us do this in hopes of it fixing itself...we wait and ponder and fret and worry, but we don't proactively make a choice.

But, as with most things, there was the straw that broke it and I decided I needed a break from the relationship and communication with that person. I made it clear that I needed a break to determine whether or not I could continue dealing with the relationships ‘as is’ without the expectation of change. Instead, by speaking up, even if not in the best way possible, I took the sledgehammer to it without realizing that’s what would happen—but in hindsight, the wall was weak from day one, thus it didn’t take much to knock it down.

I walked away from the rubble fairly unscathed.. A few emotional and ego bruises, the potential of a couple of intertwined friendships being possibly downsized because of making a choice that I’d known for months was the best choice for me.

And that is the biggest point in this lengthy note—sometimes making the best possible choice for yourself will have outcomes and create changes that you didn’t want or expect. What you have to do at that point is realize that these are things you have to accept. You can’t make choices for other people, you can’t expect them to make the choices you’d prefer—they’re ALWAYS going to function in what they feel is their best interest. And that’s how it should be—because, simply put, the only person who is going to take care of you is you. Other might help, give assistance, be there to bolster you, but at the end of the day, you have to go it alone with your decisions, your actions, and your beliefs.

I guess the point of this (beyond just needing to put it out there for myself) is that I know a lot of people who are trying to make some really tough decisions right now…some financially, some relationally, some professionally. All of them seem to get stuck in the rut of ‘other people’ regardless of what the decision is about—wondering how their choices will affect others, not making choices because someone else doesn’t want them to, or making what they know is the wrong choice just because they think someone else would want/like it. What they don’t do is consider what their lack of choosing (or choosing wrong) is going to do to them in the present and in the future.

What I’d say to them is take care of yourself first, make the decision that you believe-deep down-is the best one for you…the chips may not fall into place exactly as you’d hoped or idealized, but in the end, it will fall into place as it should.

The times I’m the most unhappy with my life is when I don’t follow that rule…and it’s something I need to always keep reminding myself of I made a tough decision this time around that at times makes me sad, sometimes angry, upset and hurt, but I know, deep down, it was the right decision for me in the long-run. And that's what counts...that logical and rational knowledge that you're taking care of the one person you have to live with day-in and day-out for the rest of your life--YOU!