repercussions

On Sunday I was in kind of a bad place and, out of habit, called someone that I should not have. There were repercussions.

Wanting to send the message that these repercussions are not ok, wanting these repercussions to not happen again, I reached out to a mutual friend/acquaintance asking for his help with this, thinking he would relay the message, that they would call me a bitch, and at least J would get the message and leave me alone.

Instead, I was surprised when J's friend responded to me with kindness. Sorry that I have had to go through this, letting me know that, unfortunately, this is not the first one of these requests that he's gotten, promising to talk to J, to consider thoughtfully the best way to approach the issue with him, to respectfully keep the details of their conversation to himself, shielding me from any further emotional/verbal abuse per my request.

It occurs to me that this is how much my interactions with J over the years have warped my perception, my perception of this situation and how others perceive me, thinking it a matter of commonsense that his friend would respond to me with hostility rather than compassion, kindness and understanding.

In some ways it helps to know that this is a pattern with J, and that there is not just something wrong with me, which is what I have been hearing from him for the past six years. But I also hate to know that he has put other people through this, can't help but feel some complicity in normalizing and accepting his behavior for so long. And yes, I know it doesn't make me responsible for his behavior. But it's difficult reconciling this past with who I want to be, the threads of this past that keep finding their way into my present, in between some old way of being and some new way that I keep just missing, that I haven't quite found my way into yet.