I’m feeling all the feels, I guess… Feeling like friends think I’m stupid or, a doormat – neither of which is a good thing to think about your friend.

It’s hard to experience people in whom you’ve invested and in whom you’ve given of yourself – going beyond your comfort zone in the doing – taking you for granted. You don’t like to think people are along for the ride when it’s fun or free or beneficial…but “busy” when situations ask them to invest. In you.

At the same time, I have a friend who seems to want to reconcile…without dealing with the issue(s) that caused the break. She wants to play nice and sweep all the ugliness under the rug, I guess…

I really like it when things can be fixed, when they can come back together – because everyone involved really wants that to happen. I just think confrontation needs to happen first. I’ve had friends throw me overboard. Then those same friends show up with a life jacket…in a yacht. And while I appreciate them coming, I’m not done wondering: Why did you throw me from the boat in the first place?

Is that not nice to say? Well, I think that if something breaks, we need to know how and why. Furthermore, I think we need to discuss ways to keep that from happening again – a breakdown of civility and thoughtfulness and patience… We need to figure out how to give each other the benefit of the doubt and how to treat each other as equally valuable.

Isn’t that what friends do? That’s what I want my friends to do.

I don’t want friends to put down their tools and take breaks while I’m still hard at work – pulling weeds and doing the necessary maintenance of showing up and reaching out that it takes to be a good friend. And, I don’t want my friends to stop communicating with me, because it gets hard… Have you ever heard the saying: It’s not the crime; it’s the coverup?

When it comes to close relationships like friendship, it’s not that I can’t accept 1) Friends needing breaks; 2) Friends not being able to do what they say they will do; or 3) Disappointments in general. No. My issue is with the behavior and communication surrounding these things. We need to talk about what’s going on inside of and around us, so there’s clarity and certainty between us.

And I feel like everyone in the relationship has his or her own weight to carry. We all have stuff. We all have things. We all have emotions that can get messy and interfere with healthy interactions. Of course! But we still have responsibilities – toward every relationship that we care about. The responsibility to communicate honestly. The responsibility to invest and be more than hungry receptacles of care and attention.

Some of us need to learn to use the calendar 📆 app on our phones 📲 I mean… Some of us have greater gifts and strengths than remembering dates and planning events – like me 🙋🏽‍♀️ But we can choose to excuse ourselves or, compensate for our weaknesses. And then, some of us simply need to learn to apologize.

I was watching one of the animal documentaries that I love and learning about what it takes to be an aerodynamic flyer. It takes a great set of wings or strong flapping or air streams – stuff that will help you get up and stay up. Things that create and sustain lift. Everything that comes against flyers as they gain speed, we can call drag. Jesus Christ is the ultimate Lifter, but we can be friends who are lifters. Or, we can become a drag.

I’m just saying: I don’t see why I should get my hand slapped or be spoken to in a gently patronizing tone of rebuke when I refuse to be a doormat. How can anything be fixed without an honest evaluation of the reality before us?

Is it me?