You are not a doormat or even remotely expendable. It's just a really hard balance to maintain. I've been thinking about situations recently where I've been on one side or the other of these tricky human equations.
I have one friend who sometimes feels really needy--calling every day (hey, I don't talk to ANYBODY every day), but then goes for very long stretches where she's out of touch, and I am still having a bit of difficulty figuring out how much contact *I* want with her. Usually, I don't want/need to see her as often as she seems to need me, and that sometimes makes me feel guilty.
Yet there was a long stretch when we had only sporadic contact, and it turned out that she was staying away because a casual thing had made her mad at me--and I hadn't really minded that she was being distant! This minor thing bothered her for so long (I had promised to lend her a book but forgot, and she took that as my not wanting her to have it, which she then inflated into my being generally insincere--I think that was her beef, I'm still not quite sure!), and the whole thing now has made me wary of her.
For the most part, however, I've gotten better at balancing how much to give and how much to expect in return from most of my friends. I'm just this side of cynical about it, though I prefer to think of it as being realistic: for the most part, people are self-centered but not necessarily because they're evil or even because they don't love you. They just see the need to weed a garden or bait a hook as the thing they want to do right now and fail to see how that makes them look in your eyes.
I've got a couple of friends who really would give me a kidney if it came to that, but even they aren't always as available to my need for them every time I'd like them to be.
I'm not advocating doing the same thing back to them. Because you're more sensitive and open-eyed, that would just make YOU feel lousy. They wouldn't necessarily make the connection on their own. Subtle doesn't work most of the time.
But you could either have an honest talk with them (do it soon, though, don't let things fester like my friend did) and tell them how it made you feel, or you can refocus on your own life and try to see the things you choose to do to be a decent human being and a good friend as just the things you choose to do, expecting that they might get recognized but won't always.
And I would suggest that you find a few more times when *you've* planned to weed and go fishing (and hang out with your online friends, cuz we love ya, and we've never even met ya!) for yourself. Yes, drop everything when there's a true emergency (bless you for all that ICU time, you wonderful woman!), but it isn't always necessary to be endlessly available for the rest of the world. You'll be a better friend if you're living your own life while you're doing it.
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Date: 2009-05-24 10:23 pm (UTC)You are not a doormat or even remotely expendable. It's just a really hard balance to maintain. I've been thinking about situations recently where I've been on one side or the other of these tricky human equations.
I have one friend who sometimes feels really needy--calling every day (hey, I don't talk to ANYBODY every day), but then goes for very long stretches where she's out of touch, and I am still having a bit of difficulty figuring out how much contact *I* want with her. Usually, I don't want/need to see her as often as she seems to need me, and that sometimes makes me feel guilty.
Yet there was a long stretch when we had only sporadic contact, and it turned out that she was staying away because a casual thing had made her mad at me--and I hadn't really minded that she was being distant! This minor thing bothered her for so long (I had promised to lend her a book but forgot, and she took that as my not wanting her to have it, which she then inflated into my being generally insincere--I think that was her beef, I'm still not quite sure!), and the whole thing now has made me wary of her.
For the most part, however, I've gotten better at balancing how much to give and how much to expect in return from most of my friends. I'm just this side of cynical about it, though I prefer to think of it as being realistic: for the most part, people are self-centered but not necessarily because they're evil or even because they don't love you. They just see the need to weed a garden or bait a hook as the thing they want to do right now and fail to see how that makes them look in your eyes.
I've got a couple of friends who really would give me a kidney if it came to that, but even they aren't always as available to my need for them every time I'd like them to be.
I'm not advocating doing the same thing back to them. Because you're more sensitive and open-eyed, that would just make YOU feel lousy. They wouldn't necessarily make the connection on their own. Subtle doesn't work most of the time.
But you could either have an honest talk with them (do it soon, though, don't let things fester like my friend did) and tell them how it made you feel, or you can refocus on your own life and try to see the things you choose to do to be a decent human being and a good friend as just the things you choose to do, expecting that they might get recognized but won't always.
And I would suggest that you find a few more times when *you've* planned to weed and go fishing (and hang out with your online friends, cuz we love ya, and we've never even met ya!) for yourself. Yes, drop everything when there's a true emergency (bless you for all that ICU time, you wonderful woman!), but it isn't always necessary to be endlessly available for the rest of the world. You'll be a better friend if you're living your own life while you're doing it.
*squishes you*