'It's more like love, ibuprofen, and easy listening.' by Kara
Thursday, July 16, 2015 at 12:37 PM

I think I spent a lot of my life unable to respect myself, and to that end when others didn't respect me I thought nothing of it. Sometimes I just didn't notice. Sometimes I did and assumed it was deserved. But I never saw fit to demand more respect for myself.

Now I've started to, and there are days when I wish I weren't, because it causes many, many more headaches than when I let people treat me as they pleased.

Respecting yourself is painful. It gives you a new lens to see through, and you start looking at a lot of people in your life through that lens. Sometimes it's wonderful because you look at friends and you see that yes, they've always had your back, even when it seemed like they might not have. Oftentimes they treated you better than you treated yourself. And then you look at others and you have this horrendous hindsight where months and years of interaction suddenly refocus and you see just how much they got away with.

A friend of mine is having some growing pains right now -- she's a very talented artist and she's getting popular and seeing a slow crawl toward a degree of tangible success. With that, she feels as though she's losing friends. I told her this is quite likely the case, and that while it hurts, it's not necessarily a bad thing. There's a reason you keep finding out that famous actors and writers and artists are buddies: commiseration.

Putting yourself out there enough to see and grab even the smallest success requires respecting yourself at least a tiny bit. And when you start doing that, people who relied on you not respecting yourself in order to maintain a friendship will get angry and confused. And then bad things happen.

Maybe they'll just nuke everything where you stand. Maybe they'll quietly undermine you day after day in an attempt to bring you back to heel. Maybe they'll start kissing your ass. Maybe it'll be some weird progression of all three. And the thing is, no matter how well you look after yourself now, it'll hurt on some level. Even if you know you don't deserve that treatment, it will hurt. Because you still remember a 'setting' where you considered this person a friend.

Here I tell people it's natural and normal to feel that way, and that eventually those empty spaces in your life will be refilled by people with similar experiences -- perhaps people you've admired and who have inspired you. This has certainly been the case for me. I'm fortunate, and a little bewildered on occasion, to be on drinking-buddy terms with people I used to (and still occasionally do) watch on television. I speak truth when I say that but it's still...

It's hurtful to get occasional blips of reminders of that shit. You try to put yourself in a better place with better people but something will always come back, and suddenly you wish you could Facebook block people for real like in the Black Mirror Christmas special because you'd finally get some peace.

At the end of the day, all any of us can do, I guess, is refocus. Look at where we're going and where we want to be, and focus on the people who are supporting us -- and support them back as they go wherever they're going. No ego, no envy.

As for the rest ... ignore them. And if they actively refuse to be ignored ... fucking nuke them from orbit, I guess.

If you have been, good night.