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Falling Out: Betrayal, Backstabbing, and Forgiveness

  • Writer: Kendall Flies
    Kendall Flies
  • Apr 9, 2023
  • 6 min read

As humans, we hold onto the littlest things and assign meaning to them. I remember in 5th grade, my teacher was giving us a grammar lesson on the difference between “lay” and “lie”. She told us, “objects lay, people lie”. I always thought that was an interesting choice of words. “People lie”. I like to think she intended to give us more than a grammar lesson that day. That she knew at least one of us would pick up on the metaphor. Maybe I always looked into things too much. I was searching for meaning in anything, so I held onto it.


Think back to when you were a kid. Our initial friendships are a birthright: your parents’ friends’ kids, the kids who lived in your neighborhood, who went to your preschool or daycare center. From the earliest I can remember, I had the idea that friendship was a lifelong commitment, no matter what. It never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t carry those people with me forever.


That's all you know. At that point your life is stable, controlled. You have no reason to believe that these people will eventually be remembered only in pictures and stories told by your parents.


Friendship in the beginning is so simple. Think about the kid you met at the hotel pool while your family was on vacation. In just a couple of hours you made a genuine connection with someone, and those hours felt like a lifetime. You knew that this person was not going to follow you home, but it didn’t matter. By now, you don’t even remember their name. But you’ll always think fondly about that time in your life where human connection was so inherently simple.


As adults, we can’t connect with people like that. At some point we get picky, and I know why, but I can’t help but be jealous of that child's ability to make an hour in the pool playing mermaids and having handstand contests seem like forever. To do that as an adult usually requires a significant layer of liquid confidence.


There’s two types of people in our adult lives: acquaintances and friends.


Acquaintances are the people that you happen to be around on the day-to-day. Coworkers, people who go to your school, the crowd that appears at every party you attend. You don’t know enough about them to have any sort of emotional investment within your relationship with them. You only see them on the weekends, during a shift, or eight hours Monday through Friday. There’s no room for trauma-dumping, to pick up on how and why their moods shift, to feel hatred when they fail to include you in their plans. Sometimes acquaintances can turn into friends, it just depends if the two are follow-up kind of people. I’m not one of those people. I wish I could be.


Friends are the people who make you feel genuinely understood. You have collateral with them. The people who turn you into a follow-up kind of person. The vacation hotel pool kind of people. There’s an immediate sense that they’re made out of the same things you are. Within 10 minutes, you’re talking about your childhood trauma, your mental illnesses, and what makes you want to wake up in the morning. You can be friends with someone your whole life and never know their favorite color. Your acquaintance told you their favorite color during your first lunch break.


Friendship is vulnerable. As much as we like to believe we can get by on our own, no man is an island.


There will be moments in time when you have to be an island. Being alone, stranded, can bring a kind of peace and security that a room full of fake friends can’t fulfill. I can’t be fake to anyone. I’ve spent too much time with myself. I don’t mind my own company, I would rather be alone forever than be someone’s sidekick. Living off of laughs from self-deprecating jokes and being just the right amount of ugly to make them feel that much more superior.


It doesn’t matter if somebody doesn’t like you. It doesn’t matter if nobody likes you. At the end of the day, all that matters is that you like you. Once you’re comfortable on your island, you achieve something more important than being likable: being respected. But at some point, that peace fades and turns into insanity. If no one’s around for long enough, you start talking to yourself just to make sure your voice still works.


The path of friendship is not always two straight lines riding into the sunset.


The older you get, the less people end up sticking around. Life changes, unfortunately, people seem not to. Falling out, betrayal, backstabbing, are all a guarantee. We meet so many people, we’re not six years old anymore, it’s illogical to believe it will all be easy and forever. But people need people, so we try and try again.


It’s vindicating to be the victim, but we all live long enough to become a villain at some point. Hurt people hurt people, and we all hurt. So we forgive.


Most people who will hurt you are not ready to realize you can be a villain and a good person at the same time. Toxic victim mentality has ruined many of my past friendships. I’ve found that the person who goes around telling everyone how good of a person they are turns out to be one of the worst people you’ve ever met. Anyone who’s actually a good person doesn’t need to waste time trying to prove it.


Some people just aren’t ready for you yet. It’s hard, but you have to let go of the people who hold you back. They’ll despise you for being secure enough to cut them off, pretend you’re a bad person so they don’t feel bad about what they did to you. Most of us can’t look in the mirror long enough to see the disappointed faces of the people we’ve wronged staring back at us. So we play our music loud enough to forget, and put on enough makeup to conceal the regrets that kept us up the night before.


Maturity is taking the knife out of your back, looking at the person who put it there, and trying to understand what within their brain moved them to do it. I have a bad habit of psychoanalyzing people within the first five minutes of meeting them. I have incredibly low expectations. That’s why I never get mad, I never hate people, I just get disappointed when they prove my cynical views right. Sometimes I wish I had enough hope in humans to not understand why they do bad things. To be naive enough to scream when I find a knife in my back. To even feel it go in. But I’ve become numb to the sensation.


I forgave you before you did it. I already knew you would hurt me. I had pre-forgiven you. I had already anticipated how shitty you would be, so I made it a point to understand why you do the things you do, so I can forgive you when the time comes.


You can write the longest, most in depth paragraph to someone describing all the ways they have hurt you, and all the reasons you deserved better. But no amount of words, no amount of sense can make them a different person. In my experience - people don’t change.


People like to play pretend though. Some people will reach out, years later, asking for forgiveness in the form of getting coffee. Personally, I love coffee, but I have no interest in sipping a cup of the past.


Forgiveness does not have to be loud. You do not have to announce your forgiveness to the world. It’s not my responsibility to make you feel better about what you did to me. Forgiveness isn’t a welcome back sign. Forgiveness isn’t a one way ticket back into someone’s life.


From my perspective, forgiveness is like saying goodbye to the only place you’ve ever called home, but knowing that your next destination will be a place where you are wanted.


I am not a hotel where you can come and go as you please. I’ve spent years making a home within myself, and I’ve become used to living alone here. I don’t need a roommate who starts fires. You are forgiven. But there is no longer a space for you here.


I forgive for me. I do not forgive for you. That may seem selfish, but I’m doing you a favor. Why would I validate you for being a shit person? If I was innocent enough, I would believe that by cutting people off I somehow forced them to take a minute to think about why someone didn’t come crawling back on their hands and knees to them like an abused child. But I know people all too well, they’ll do it again. Searching for the forgiveness they couldn’t get from me. I hope when they think of me they’ll feel some inkling of remorse, but I know their delusions will lead them to forget me. I hope that someday, someone proves me wrong.


The funny thing is, I can forgive other people for hurting me, for betraying me. I put myself in their head, think about their personalities, their lives. I understand why they do the things they do. And I feel sorry for them.


But no one has betrayed me more than myself. No one has said more hateful things to me than me. No one has ruined my life as many times as I have. Over and over again, I abandon myself - and I’m the only person I can’t forgive.


 
 
 

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