After a while, it's not them - it's you!

So - a few posts back I referred to a friend that would tell people personal things that I had told them in confidence for a laugh, say offensive things that I'd repeatedly ask them not to because they found it funny and seemingly try to embarrass me on numerous occasions.

This actually went on for years until a particular incident gave me the time and space to look at this relationship properly.

Now I should say that while I am evolving day to day, my evolution is far from complete and not at a stage where I'm able to rationalise these incidents in a timely manner (timely enough for my liking). So, when given the opportunity to look at this relationship properly, I had realised how things were for so long and automatically opted to play the blame game in so much as to make attempts to rationalise why this person would not listen. I'd repeatedly asked this person to stop doing these things and still they continued to do them. Why?!?!

Eventually I came to the following conclusion. It was all down to me. I'm not saying that I encouraged the behaviour in any way but I realise that I was probably more at fault than they were in a sense. Who am I to tell someone "stop being who you are to suit me!!"? No one has that right, least of all me, yet I find we do it in all forms of relationships.

We all have an ideal for the types of people that we would like in our lives and the universe will put a varied spectrum of people in your path over time and some of those people will become our friends. They tick enough of the criteria to make it into our circle and on occasion we opt to "trim the fat". Stop doing this, don't do that, be more like this, act more like that!

The point is, it's all our own choice. It's our choice to become friends with someone and if that person does things that you don't agree with, it's our choice to either accept them for who they are and the things they do or not.

The same way no one has any place to tell me who or how I should be, I have no place telling anyone who or how they should be. It is not for us to change the things we don't like about people but to make a decision based on the simplest of questions.

Are we willing to accept this person as they are?

I think full and unequivocal acceptance is the only way to do it. The alternative leaves the possibility of finding yourself in a place where all of the good things that a person has done are heavily overshadowed by our focus on the things about this person that make us unhappy. I feel this does not honour the good times shared and the relationship because our focus and final memories are of why everything went so horribly wrong.

Surely there must be a way to part ways without everything being such a conflict? To be able to say "OK, so things didn't work out - but that's cool".

Maybe it just gets more difficult the more time we allow to pass? Maybe our failure to nip it all in the bud in a timely fashion causes us to become more emotionally involved so that when things do go wrong, we're left with a feeling of emptiness representing the other party. That leaves us with our first (and unnecessary) port of call for rationalisation - "where should the blame be placed?" as opposed to saying "this just wasn't meant to be".

Until the next post...
Peace and Love
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