Blogging For Therapy (goodbye 'friend')

There are days when I just do not understand people.

I started this blog with the original intent of providing some kind of communication with the people I know, and like so many other bloggers before me also found the easy journaling activity like a type of therapy . . . a way to excise and purge, a catharsis of sorts. Other bloggers have commented on it, too, and I've even seen a few who have started their blogs on the recommendation of professional therapists.

I have never posted anything that wasn't already known to someone [obvious exception: the things most people don't know about me list], so it's really less therapy and more 'this is who I am' blogging.

A few days after I started this blog, I posted a list of events in my life that hurt me and others I cared about and said why they hurt me. They were all events from the recent past few years, and I certainly wasn't commenting on them as a means to revive anger or pain. One of them was straight out "here's how I hurt myself and what I learned from it" and yet by publically posting that very admission it was construed as a bitter and selfish means of punishing someone else. How this occurs, when I have only ever said from the beginning that I was at fault for everything and apologized for it again and again, I do not know or understand.

And so I am Cast Out. In a calmer mood I reread what else was written to me, read how she always felt like an outsider to me, how she couldn't share things with me for fear that I might disapprove of her choices, how she felt she wasn't interesting enough for me. I see for the first time that our friendship was a farce; every thing I ever said or did she analyzed and dissected to some minutae that caused her to feel inferior or inadequate.

I cannot possibly hope to compete against constant guilt and self-doubt; I never blamed her for either the events that led to this break or how I chose to feel about them, and I am not responsible for the guilt she chose to carry.

By her own admission she has been quietly shutting me out for years, and then has the audacity to say she's tired of tapping at my window asking to be let in to my life. She said she valued my friendship but I feel I have been lied to for 19 years; I never knew her and she didn't want me to know her.

She's right, we are done.