There comes a point in some friendships where the relationship has turned toxic. It's not always easy to come to terms with this. Since getting sick, I have encountered toxic friendships many times. For a while, I ignored what these people were doing to me. I let them fool me into thinking that they were my friend, even though I truly knew that our friendship would never be like what it used to. I let those people make me suffer through over a year of loneliness. These people used to be my friends. We hung out often. But chronic illness and a wheelchair sure can scare people off. Eventually I got tired of them saying "we should hang out sometime" and then never acting on their words. So I let them go. It sounds simple, but it was one of the hardest things I've had to do in my life. Letting a friendship go requires a grieving process of sorts. There were a lot of tears and there was a lot of anger, but at some point I just deleted them from friends lists, deleted their number, and hid all pictures I had of them. These people really screwed me over, and I could finally see it. But just because I had erased them from anywhere where I could see them, it doesn't mean that they were out of my memories. Still, I reminisce about the days before NMO.
When I left for college, I was both excited and terrified about the new friendships that were about to blossom. The first two weeks at school were terrible for me. It seemed that everyone had found their "group" and I still hadn't made a real friend yet. (Little did I know, I met someone who would become one of my very best friends at orientation weekend) When I finally started making friends I felt like I was proving all of those people from home wrong. There actually are people out there who want to be friends with me, regardless of the wheelchair. By about halfway through first semester, I was friends with the group that I would end up spending a lot of time with, and eventually would consider some of my best friends. (Not the person I mentioned earlier.) So it came as a shock to me when about a month and a half ago, these people started to become very sour towards me. Nothing had changed, except for the fact that I was back in my wheelchair full time due to a severely sprained foot. But all of a sudden, they stopped talking to me and stopped wanting to do things with me. Eventually we started getting in fights relatively frequently, and I started hearing about someone talking about me behind my back. The relationships had turned toxic. I did a lot of soul searching and realized that these people were making me feel the same kind of loneliness that I felt back in high school. This was not okay with me. When I decided that there was not going to be any future in these friendships, I decided that I'd have to let them go at some point. Recognizing that I needed to let go was surprisingly easier than before. Was it because I'd gone through it before? Was it because I knew we actually had nothing in common? Was I just fooling myself? I'll probably never know. But I'm just over having friends that think it's okay to treat me like crap. It's empowering knowing that I won't take crap from anyone anymore. I deserve to be happy. And if making myself happy means letting someone (who I thought was my friend) go, then so be it.
Note: Regardless of the few people I talked about in this, I still do have some pretty amazing friends. And someday I'll have a whole blog post dedicated to them. They're some pretty incredible people. <3
