Et tu, Brute?
This Article was originally published and then retracted for personal reasons. I have decided to republish it with the original timestamp.
There is nothing more painful that betrayal, especially when it is by a person that you have accepted as a close friend. But this is something that recently happened to me.
This is not a bash piece, though in my heart I would love nothing more than to take this person apart, verbally. But at my core, that is not and never has been who I am. I do get mad, I to hurt, I do feel, but I think that it speaks more to who I am to be the better person than to throw the other person to the wolves, so to say, and publicly assault them.
I do not make friends easily… in fact, I would say that I really do not make friends anymore at all. I have people I know and past friends that I have let slip away, but when it comes to going out, meeting up with people and having a good time, that is really just not me. It is not because I do not WANT friends, in fact it is just the opposite. I will look longingly at people sitting in groups at the bar or in restaurants, as they talk, cavort and have a grand time. I will watch them and wish that one of those people was me. That I had that kind of group that I could get together with. That I was one of THOSE people.
When, as recently happened, I stumble upon a person that I like, who seems to click with me, whose personality is pleasant and compatible with mine, I feel a bond. Unlike my usually careful, responsible and paranoid self, this time I went ahead and opened up and let this person in. Some of the problems and ordeals that they spoke of were similar to things I had gone through. Some of the challenges that they faced were on the same note as ones I had dealt with through my life. I felt as though this person would be someone I could talk to and share problems with and maybe help one another.
Unfortunately I was incorrect.
I will not go into details, but in the end this person turned out to be no different than the others I had met in my earlier years that caused me to build my personal walls in the first place. It appeared that this person had a sophomoric agenda, like those people I remember from high school, to open a person up, gain their confidence and friendship, and then attempt to emotionally poison them. In this case, I was that person.
The level of pain and betrayal that I felt was indescribable. It pushed me into the start of a depressive bout that I was worried that I would not get out of any time soon. Luckily I was able to fall back on the help of my wife and son. I spent the next few days hanging around with my four-year-old son, since my wife was at work most of this time.
I have to tell you a bit about him, my son. He is only four years old, but the little guy is wise beyond his years. One of the times I was sitting with him after we watched a movie and I asked him, not really expecting an answer, just wanting to talk aloud, “Giddy… what do you do when you feel bad?”
He looked at me for a moment and told me, “I go give Nana and Pampa and Mommy and Poppi a hug and kiss. Don’t feel bad poppi, lets go see mommy.”
And that, as simple as it sounds, was my turning point. Suddenly my son gave me a life lesson that was something that I really already knew, but he needed to remind me. That no matter how bad things had gotten, no matter how bad I hurt after this person inflicted what I consider to be a brutal betrayal, I have my family there to support and help me back up and on my feet again.
Within days the depression had started to subside and I was feeling better, but there was still anger and hurt.
Anger for what this person had done to me, anger in myself for not following a lifetime of rules that I had in place to prevent things like this from happening, anger for sharing a part of myself with this person that I normally kept to myself and my family.
Hurt for the fact that now I have to relearn how to be who I was before. Hurt that I had been foolish enough to think that someone like this liked who I was and would allow me to befriend them. Hurt because I thought I had opened a new chapter in my life and had learned to start letting people in again.
I am not sure that either the pain or hurt will ever go away, at least not completely. But I understand this person now and I realized that it was my own fault for letting it happen. I realized that there was a reason I built that wall so many years ago and now have not only put it back up, but reinforced it. This will not happen again.
So, my takeaway has been that I need to be careful about who I befriend and always remember that family is there when things go south.
As for the person in question… well, I cannot see feeding the anger, they are not worth it. It does hurt, losing that friendship, but I suspect that it was better that it happened now, than later. At a time when there was more invested in it. I do hope that this person looks back one day and sees something in this that helps them understand about human interactions, friendships and trust.
This site is my release.A place for me to talk about things that annoy, please, or excite me.
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