The Last 8 Months

8 months ago someone i respected deeply for the work he was doing and the way he treated those in his care nearly died. He remained critical for about a month. During that time i did a lot of praying, a lot of bargaining, and i made a lot of promises to God about what i would do if he allowed this person’s soul to return to the land of the living. One of the things i promised i would do was quit feigning indifference and keeping my distance. I knew the person was leaving the state soon so i didnt want to get to know someone well, knowing they were leaving shortly and it would just feel like a loss. Death has a way of changing one’s perspective on just about everything and narrowing one’s understanding of their original timeline. I thought i had all the time in the world. Maybe the individual would return in a few years. Perhaps i would get to know him then. Once the reaper was in play i realized if i wanted to know him i had to hurry up and overcome my fear of social pain. i promised God if he could just have a second chance at life i would put his needs ahead of mine, always, and try to think more about what would be best for him rather than what would be safest and best for me. Sometimes you make decisions in a moment of crisis that are harder to sustain longterm and may require revision once the danger has passed.

There are stages of coping when you nearly lose someone from the land of the living. First comes the emergency stage where everything is just depression, despair, and intense anxiety. You are trying to get the body to hang on and to heal. Once the individual is awake you move on to stage 2, the window of opportunity for recovery; the window of neuroplasticity. if function and speech is going to be regained it is most likely going to happen in a short window of time directly after the body awakes following a severe medical event. All energy is focused on rehabilitation and regaining function while they have the best chance of doing so. Once function is restored one can focus on the person’s perception and memories. After that is taken care of, friends and family may start assisting the person in putting life back together or beginning to establish a new one.

I got so caught up in being there for my friend that i failed to ask myself if he wanted or could use a friend.

For 8 months i tried with every fiber of my being to be the best friend a person could have. I was a careful, patient, and consistent friend. I poured my heart and soul into the task at hand. In the beginning the person seemed to be getting something positive out of the friendship. Shortly down the road, however, i would become an entity that was more a resource than a friend and i would cease to be viewed as someone with value or worth of any kind. For whatever reason, i would sink to the bottom of his social totem pole and eventually learn a hard lesson when i recognized pity extended in my direction from a mutual friend of ours. Not a thing you want to see while attempting to make sense of why actions dont match the words you are being given by an individual you care about.

This broke my heart, on so many levels. Hoping i was wrong in my assessment of the situation, i gave him a chance to choose whether or not to maintain the friendship. I never heard from him again. And so i had my answer, the one i had probably been avoiding discovering for too long. You cannot make someone see you as valuable. You cannot make someone assign you worth. if they see you as a resource and their need for said resource has evaporated, you will never hear from them again. You can choose to feel bitter about all the ways in which you were used, and that bitterness will eat at your soul from the inside, or you can just let it be what it is. Had i known i was being used i probably would not have extended any of the help i did. But truthfully, any kindness extended in my former friend’s direction was given from my heart and from my soul as a christian. It was meant with compassion. How it is received is of smaller matter than the intention with which it left me. I dont regret being kind to someone who needed it, only that my kindness fell on deaf ears, but that is not within my control. That is for God to make sense of on his timeline. So now, i am trying to put the pieces of my own life back together. Everything that i put on hold to be there for my friend has been neglected and needs attention. I am very far behind in all of my projects. I havent written or kept up with my sponsored elephant in a long time. I have several birthday and christmas projects that will take almost the whole year to prepare. I have trees from last year sitting in their pots on the porch, waiting to be planted. There are so many things i quit doing to focus all my energy and attention on being there for my friend in his time of rising from the ashes of his old life. Excused from the role as i now find myself, i am starting to remember what life was like before i began measuring myself with someone else’s ruler. I’d be lying if i said i didnt feel a massive loss but it has been a strangely relieving feeling to not have to be constantly reminded that i fall short of meeting somebody else’s standards. It occurs to me now that for the past 8 months the resounding message has been “you are not enough”. I dont know, given the amount of effort and try i put in, if that subliminal message is fair, but this world does not promise to be fair, and fair or not i’m confident it is the message i was meant to receive. It was time to accept that for this person i was a resource and nothing else and they had successfully convinced me otherwise for a foolishly long period of time. Eyes wide open, it was time for me to leave him alone and turn my attention back to my homestead.