Before I start this blog entry, please note that the focus is on my offline relationships, not here. On my blog, I am able to connect and be caring without “taking on” anyone else’s pain. If only I could be that way in my offline life…
Last week, I felt like I was being bombarded daily with drama from all directions in my offline life. Every time the phone rang, someone was in crisis. Every email seemed to hold drama in it. It didn’t help that serious “drama” was going on at one of my part-time jobs, and I had to intervene with multiple students who were panicked about how the “drama” would affect their grades. Everywhere I turned, someone was in crisis and needed me to help them out.
Don’t get me wrong – I am a great friend and am very supportive of those in my life. Where it starts to overwhelm me is when the room for myself gets choked out as I become mired in everyone else’s stuff. There is no time for me and my own coping mechanisms as I get pulled into everyone else’s drama over and over again.
The worst part is those in my life who then “blame” me for their drama. That’s that part that gets me angry and gets me saying, “Enough!” I used to attract this kind of personality before therapy. I would imagine I was great to be around for those who don’t want to take responsibility for their own stuff. As an abused child, I was programmed to believe that everything was “my fault,” and I was comfortable in that role. If the problem is “my fault,” then I have the power to fix it. That’s why it helped me to survive the child abuse by believing that it was “my fault.” To accept the truth – that I had absolutely no power to make the child abuse stop – was to accept despair.
However, I am no longer an abused child, and my patience has run out on people in my day-to-day life who are miserable, won’t make the effort to change it, and want to dump all of their misery on me. Goodness knows, I have a ton of internal drama that I could be dumping on other people and using as a reason to stay perpetually miserable, but I don’t. I write the drama out here, and people can choose to read it or not. And, for the most part, I stay pretty positive in my life, even after weeks of little sleep and getting slammed with flashbacks.
I feel better after getting that off my chest.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
Blooming Lotus 