Monday, August 20, 2007

The Value of understanding

Sometimes in life, people can run into a lack of understanding and tolerance. People grow, change, and heal from things we experience over time. Surviving Domestic Violence is one of these things and when one changes as part of healing, not everyone accepts these changes. It's unfortunate, but while finding our way, people at times get lost in the shuffle.

I've been growing, healing and moving forward with something like life, and now some people aren't terribly happy. What makes it so much harder people expect they can go right on treating me the way they always have. Somehow they figure that I'm just going to go right on taking the same old crap I always have because for years I never stood up for myself. Now, I'm standing up for myself, they're not having it one bit and I'm public enemy number one. Complete crap, that's what it is I tell you, complete crap!

So, while I didn't lose any friends or family because some changes I've made in my life, I am because I'm no longer willing to be a punching bag. Sucks to be them I guess!

People claim they understand what I've been through, what I'm going through, and then they turn around and show me they have no fraking clue. I just wish sometimes I could hit them with a clue-by-four, but I know that won't help.

Like explaining color one blind from birth, when someone lacks any true frame of reference you can talk until you're blue in the face but it just doesn't help. I try to be patient, really I do, but over time this gets really old. Faced again with the same old question of how much is friendship worth, I find myself knowing when enough, is exactly that. So, I lose a friend, someone I've known for over a decade, because they are too self involved to see that the very things they complained about with my late husband, are some of the same things they are doing.

Try and talk about it? Yeah, great idea. The very same people I used to be able to talk to about anything, I can't discuss anything with. Again, color, blind people. And so I go on . . .