I have been thinking a lot lately about an ex-friend. Our friendship ended three years ago on Thanksgiving. I had reached a point where I no longer trusted her not to hurt me again. Unfortunately, I got to that point when she was in the middle of a divorce. While I have no personal experience with divorce, I have heard that even the most amicable divorce is extremely difficult and emotionally draining. And hers was not going to be amicable. So whenever I think of her, I feel a tremendous amount of guilt and sadness. I can’t do anything about it now, but sometimes I wish I had waited until after the divorce – even though I know why I didn’t.
We are still friends on FB and other social networks. I don’t hate her. I don’t think she hates me. Neither of us posts much anyways. We have a lot of mutual friends who don’t even know that she and I aren’t friends anymore. I wouldn’t mind being friends with her again – from a distance. If our paths ever cross again, then whatever happens, happens. But I am not going to go out of my way to do it.
When I start feeling really guilty, I have to remind myself why we are not friends anymore. That when I finally cut her out of my life, it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. That no one else in my life condemned me for my decision – and in fact, supported it.
It was not any single thing she did. It was a ton of things over almost a decade of friendship. If the last thing had been the only thing, we would still be friends. But instead it unleashed a decade of memories of all the times I felt used. I tried to tell her how I felt. She tried to make me feel bad about my feelings. I was supposed to overlook her behavior, because she was getting a divorce. If our roles had been reversed, she would have understood. Even her therapist thinks I should have understood! That was when I finally realized it. She has always been selfish. The divorce did not make her selfish; she was selfish already.
Still, I wonder if she is OK, if she ever did get divorced, if she is seeing someone new. My husband asks why don’t I ask one of our mutual friends how she is doing? But I’d rather not. It would be pure gossip. I don’t want to put any of my friends in that position. And I guess I just don’t want her to be gossiped about, if that makes sense.
I have no point with this post. I have just been thinking about her a lot.
anna is alive. 