Sometimes it's not just the breakups and makeups that tear our heart apart or put it back together. Friendships are usually the core of any little socialite's being. Of course my family is my backbone. My mom, dad, and sister are each individually one of my best friends and favorite people to spend my time with - on their own levels and in shape of different dynamics with me. And boyfriends have always been my best buds. Some of them were already that way and some of them grew, at a rapid pace, into that. So friendship, in essence, is a large part of every single relationship, no matter what the dynamic is, that I have ever had in life.
Friendships mean more to me than a lot of values even. That's how important it is to me to be taken seriously as a friend and it explains my need to have these friends of mine understand how serious I am in my feelings toward them. For example, there are those "questions of rhetoric" like 'what would you grab if your house was on fire?' and 'who would you take a bullet for?'" that we all liked to ask and rev up conversations when we were younger. When people ask me who I would take a bullet for, I usually say 'just about anybody!' I'm not going to die for the criminal types that have made taking gunshots for friends a rhetorical topic. How unfortunate, really. But, I say 'just about anybody' because I know where I am going when I time out. My mom and dad do, my sister does, and I hope that any of my friends that are standing around watching me bleed-out for the sake of another also know that I am headed homeward when my earthly life ends. To be a hero, no. I wouldn't be able to feel the recognition I may be honored with by taking a bullet. To save one single life of 'just anybody' I would rip the worlds apart of my loved ones? No, I would hope that whether it saved a single soul at all, it would be a testament to my faith and that more souls would trust God in this mean, cruel world and that it would be a testament to the love and admiration I have always had for people I recognize as my friends.
The love is big and bountiful that I have for the people in my life. The ones that I want to spend my precious time with. The ones who I want to spend that time with and have them consider it more precious for having me around. The friends that I would take bullets for or that I'd even set fire to my new room for if it meant keeping them out of harms away.
But not for the friends who are the ones with the loaded gun pointed at me. I'm not going to keep taking the bullet when I'm walking around with a target on my heart like it's the first day of hunting season. I keep doing it to myself, and I am just simply 'done' with it.
When my dad was diagnosed with cancer, I saw my family change for the better in so many ways. It didn't happen over night though and it didn't happen at any free expense. We paid for it, because to truly develop and turn over these leaves in life you have to be willing to be realistic about things and the reality is that you have to deal with the rain to get the rainbow. I didn't understand it as a 6th grader, but the difficult times are what produce a lot of knowledge people have as far as who their true friends are. God wouldn't put us through difficult times if it didn't have the potential to make this great discovery and reinvention. My parents truly found out who some of their best friends were and weren't when they were struggling with loads and loads of emotion and anxieties. Of course most of their friends called them when they heard about dad's diagnosis. These people were still human-beings, they just weren't best friends like they may have been thought of prior. But is a true friend someone who is probably genuinely sorry when they call to say sorry, but then act as if the cancer went away the next day? I mean, yeah, that day we heard the news our lives changed wholely and drastically, but wait a minute, where'd everyone go 6 months later? This is getting hard now! The reality of being a cancer patient with needles in the arm, extra traveling days to see doctors and more days on top of the days of work I never missed that I spend away from the girls. More exhaustion. More fear. More anxiety.
I just don't get it... do you have to be like me and go through all this 'crap' in life in order to understand the needs of others in a friendship? It's a 2 way street. Sometimes the street lights go out, sometimes it's a block party, but at the end of every night it's a street. Friendships are like that. There are darker times, fixable problems, and sometimes they are full of fun in every shape and size. But it's a friendship, at the end of the day.
That's why my true friends are the ones that understand this fire is still not over for me. No one understands it because they have never been through a fire. It is hard to understand the needs of one human when it's atypical of the human experience. I mean, the fire-fighters put out the flames and the fire is over. Let bygones be bygones, right guys? No. That's not how it works. And everytime you are so insensitive to that fact, the flames that still haunt me just flare up and it's like pouring kerosene straight to a match.
The past two days have been quite the learning experience as I have tried to propell onward from some of the devastating results of April's fire. Friendships that went to the gutter were laid upon me and I so badly wanted to go back to the 'old ways' and have a good time with a friend who used to mean so much to me. I was getting to hang out with a group of friends that ought to know how cherished they are. And I was finally going to let my recent hardwork and self-discipline of staying in, get to go out and have a good time to see a band that I have grown to really super-duperly love.
But the consideration was a one-way street. I made plans days ago so that it might actually happen, and that's what you do (I thought) to show that you really wanted it to happen. But it didn't. And I can choose to be a bitch about it or I can choose to just let it go and give myself an A for effort. If this certain friend didn't want to go, he could've told me before I was blow-drying my hair in an effort to spend some good, quality time with an old friend, a group of gals, and one amazing band (and that's extra effort because I usually let it dry out the window while on the 52mile trek to Birmingham).
I'm disappointed by others, but not in the way I am about a certain friend. The others have priorities and lives that allow for changes in plans because of things that 'just happen' when you have a seriously committed relationship and prior commitments, etc. But, it still is nice to know before last minute that this night you looked forward to all week is just a no-go.
Then, to know that my ex-boyfriend will be there -who is a music-idiot and has no appreciation for the band who is playing, just gave me plenty of reasons not to go. Not like I'd be showing up in any true 'fashion' with friends who don't want to be there and a head full of wisdom knowing that I'm a better person for trying than not.
But I'm throwing in the towel and hanging up the cleats with this game. The music-idiot can do his stupid dance that always made me uneasy with second-hand embarassment all he wants with my new favorite band playing and the lead singer singing the lyrics that tell a story far more invigorating than any flat, one dimensional thrill he ever gave me as my boyfriend. Because if I was there, flower-dancing and shoutin' hollers at my Chapel Hill musicians I'd be all smiles and I'd be gone to Carolina in my mind because those sweet tunes are all things new and make me think of the new and adventurous life that I found the very same weekend that I found my love for the band I'm talking about. I'd be bouncing around the room like a leprachuan who found a pot of gold, because I did - and I am a field of four leaf clovers lucky!
I'm just not going to put myself in those situations though. Not when I know I have a better life elsewhere and that waiting it out and not being hurt by friends who are not so and trying to make old friendships spark again.
Some things just won't catch fire, and other things that aren't supposed to, do. The flames of these friendships are not catching fire and blazing any paths for me in my life, so I'm just going to stop trying to do it all myself. Because there is someone who has reminded me that good people do exist and that people DO find my interesting enough to not only want to get to know me, but truly know me, and therefore they know how deeply hurt I am by the shallowness of friendships that I thought were much deeper than they actually are.
I guess when you play it safe in the kiddie pool, the shallow end of the real pool seems deeper than imaginable when you promote yourself to the bigger world. Then you hang out in the 3foot waters and you realize that the real fun is in the deep end with the grown-ups.
I know the dangers of the deep end and I know there are things in the deep end that are harder to see than in the shallow. But what's the fun in not taking a risk and exploring new waters? To be honest, it's not just more fun, more thrilling, and representative of going to the next level, it's just better than all the games and chaos that go on with the immature people in the pool's shallow end. That's exactly what I don't need.
A lot of people who have had to go through things and lose the magnitude of "things" that I did in that room would want to play it safe. Maybe not even get their toes wet yet, and I understand that because it's far more emotional that anyone can comprehend. ( And y'all, when I say the 'magnitude', I mean HUGE. I say that because A LOT was in that room. The fact that I did not have any storage space whatsoever means that what I owned is what I lost, and I've always been more than grateful for the great amount of stuff I was blessed with. But like I say, he giveth. And he taketh.)
But, as I plunge into new beginnings everyday, I choose NOT to play it safe. I'm diving headfirst into waters that I trust, with blind faith, are deep. I jumped off a cliff with the hope that it would make a splash for ME and whoever else was at the bottom waiting on me.
And sometimes, someone else is down at the bottom in those deep waters that aren't visited much by a lot of people. Because you have to jump without being afraid to fall and it's not 'what everybody else is doing' and it's looked at as 'crazy' or running away from something. It's just not that way, and if it was I still wouldn't care what others thought about me. Why start now?
So if people want to say I'm not a good friend because I chose tonight to hang up the cleats and not start another game, then so be it. Those are the very people that think I just like to chase tornadoes and put myself into a stirred mess of drama. They are the ones who say I'm crazy for jumping into something I know nothing about, but I know they are secretly admiring my tenacity to go after the new and exciting. And that's why I can sleep at night, because I chose to KNOW these people. I chose to listen to their needs and try to be there to help them with those needs whenever I could. I know that deep down they are good people and will make many friends because their personality is charming and witty and they can make almost anyone laugh on the worst day of their life, and the one that couldn't understand the emotional attachment I have to music will too because he's like the ledge-step in the deep end. You think you're in uncharted waters and as deep and expansive as you can possibly be and then you realize you're not but on a step, a safety zone, that is the edge of something even more exasperating - if you let go.
I let go of him because he would not look at life as an adventure. I'm letting go of the funny guy because sometimes life gets serious and there are things that happen between friends that can't be fixed with a 459876th trip to the same bar, doing the same thing that has always been done for 5 years now. I was willing to drive the hour to Birmingham to do something out of the ordinary and to dance to a sweet little tune or two. No, no one has heard of them and I had never heard of them either, until I found the place where I was going to make my dive head-first. But now I'm in LOVE with this band and just wanted to bring the kind of friends that would enjoy them with me, to a place out of the ordinary and to hear some music that is new to everyone. But does that make it any worse? No. Am I upset that I am not hearing the band right now? No. I am, I've actually heard more than I would have since it's a never-ending playlist of mine now. But am I upset that some friends fail to see that this was about much more than a band from North Carolina? Yes. Am I going to put in the unreciprocated effort anymore? Nope, this blog post was all I've got.
I like swimming in my new life's waters. A little bit from my past, a lot of bit undiscovered. It's funny how I found it on the same exact sand that was under my toes when I saw the ocean for the first time... as a little little girl. It is the same body of water that I grew up beside in Florida, but the ocean brings on new life from every different perspective and I have a good one now. I understand the world a lot better than before, and that is because I made this commitment to let this fire develop me rather than unravel me.
He unraveled other things, but developed me. If I am put down for further developing myself then I am only given more proof that everyone needs a little fire in their life, in one way or the other. I already had passions in life that were on fire: children with special needs, journalism, music. And I already had more than 3 dimensions to me, but I didn't let the fire burn me down to just 3 - how normal would that be. So maybe some of my growth also lies in cutting some ties. And the way some people have acted and used the knife to the back tactic, I'm going to show that I'm a bigger person by just nipping it with some child-proof scissors. When I picked the things of my past that I wanted to bring to the future, I left the mean snake-in-the-grass sneaky Baily, wait no - I left her in high school, I left the ridiculous sometimes too dramatic Baily. Now, I deal with the drama that is needed and typical of anyone that chooses to display feeling and emotion in their life.
And I don't deal with the drama that isn't needed.
peace and love
baily
good riddance
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