The Outside Perspective

“The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.” - Alan Alda

A lot of major stuff happened over the weekend in my personal life, and I can’t get too specific out of respect for the other people involved.  So I don’t know how legible this entry will be to someone without the proper context, but I feel the need to write about the lessons and direction I’ve gotten out of it all.  So here goes.

I messed up, pretty bad.  I violated the trust of someone I never thought I’d be capable of doing something like that to.  And when I was confronted with what I’d done I had 2 ways I could handle it.  I could ignore the validity of their complaints and shrug it off as lunacy, or I could take a long hard look at myself, and ask what it meant to who I was as a person and what could have possibly led to such a moral break between my actions and my beliefs.

After the gut reaction to senselessly try to make myself the hero of this situation, I knew I’d done something wrong and had to fess up.  Through email I apologized, profoundly.  I can’t claim to be perfect, or anything close, and I begged for a second chance based on history and the knowledge that it wasn’t something I was taking lightly.

So I began to look at myself, and my history.  I began to look at my relationship with this person/people over my life.  I’d been accused of being passive aggressive more than once, and now I had clear evidence that this was not made up.  I knew something deep-seeded in both my relationship with them and my own personal issues must be the underlying cause, and that it had clearly been building for years now.  I began to look at this as an opportunity to learn something about myself, if only to be a silver lining.

And learn I did.

Looking back over, literally, my ENTIRE life, I see a pattern in my relationships of almost every form.  I am a very dependent person.  I’ve never truly faced a dilemma on my own.  And this trait meant the only friendships that historically stuck were ones where I had something to offer in return for my dependency.  And so almost every long-term friendship I’ve ever had was severely co-dependent.  They would lean on me for certain things, and I would go to them to validate my opinions, beliefs, actions and extensively, my identity.  I could rely on their strengths so long as they could rely on mine.

I realized this because I began to see what had led to my passive-aggressive behaviour.  As I grew as a person, and on some level began to become aware of my dependence, I began to go through 2 things.  I began to want to separate myself from the people I depended on, to establish my own independence.  And I also began to resent the ones that I couldn’t find space from, either through my need for them, or their need for me, often both.

It’s funny, at the time of my road-trip I didn’t know what I was looking for.  So many people asked me in scepticism about why I felt the need to do something so drastic when I wasn’t financially ready for it, and historically it wasn’t something I was known for doing, something so independent.  But as time goes on since then, I find more and more answers as to what I as looking for, and there were many, some unrelated.

One of those things was independence.  For just under 3 weeks, I was completely on my own, free to make my decisions and have my own personal experiences.  And it was amazing.

I began to sense this on the trip, but only now do I see how sadly ironic, but also kind of revealing it is that the source of this advice ended up being the issue:

“You can’t really see your life as a whole until you leave it completely and see it from the outside.”

Realizing these things I explained to the people in question that the passive-aggressive actions I’d done I could finally explain.  I was trying to distance myself from them because, for me at this time, it’s what I needed.  But because of history and strong personal bonds, and not to mention a tendency to trust their opinions more than my own, I kept failing.

And now that I was identifying the nature of our severe co-dependent relationship, I somehow expected them to realize it from their side too, to see how they had depended on me for other things.  I poured my heart and soul into an email, because they deserved to know why I had been drifting away, and why I had been acting out.

When I got my response, it became quite clear they didn’t understand where I was coming from at all.  They completely side-stepped the issues I brought up with them.  By now I’d realized if our friendship were to continue, we both needed to acknowledge our dependence on one another, and seek independence in those areas.  I was out in Edmonton chasing my independence, and doing my part in removing any dependencies I had on them.  I had pointed out their dependency on me, and clearly they were not ready to see it.

This did not make me angry in the slightest.  Their letter, though effectively telling me it was all in my head, was very sensitively written, and I could tell they truly believed what they were saying, and were truly concerned for me.  They claimed to acknowledge the co-enabling we’d done, but didn’t actually acknowledge any of the dependencies they had on me which I had clearly pointed out and supplied ample evidence.

But I knew, for now at least, this had to end.  And so did they.  It was a very peaceful parting of ways.  They have their path to walk, which hopefully diverges from each other as well at some point, and I had mine.

But to be fair, I couldn’t accuse them of sidestepping my issue without giving theirs some real thought.  This was, after all, a moment of true clarity in my life, I should seize all information given to me.  But the issues I had with them were actually being pointed out to me for years now by other friends, family, and even complete strangers who knew me over other mediums.  Clearly this was not all in my head. 

Whenever those friends, family members, and others would ask me how it didn’t bother me, I’d see it as a strange question.  They were my friends, and this kept them even closer.  But now I see that dependencies will do that.  And even though I was one of the last people to see it, I do now.

And so my life in Edmonton has taken on even more excitement.  I’d already decided this was something I was going to pursue as a career before any of this started, but it gave this new life even more reason, and gave it an even profounder sense of accomplishment.

I’ve begun to form some real friendships out here already.  Hanging out on weekends, meeting new people every day, having deep conversations and great fun.  Some really cool people too.  And it feels great, because it’s something that is mine, something achieved independently, of my own accord, for my own reasons.

The only fear I have is that, given the nature of dependencies, these people will follow me to my new life.  This independence is revolutionary for me, and for now I want it to be entirely separate.  I don’t want to see them right now, or have to worry about ignoring them.  For the time being, it’s best for me not to have to worry about them at all. 

It’s a shame I didn’t realize these things earlier so we could have worked them out before it got to this point, especially before I allowed myself to subconsciously act out against them, but what’s done is done, and because of the urgency of it coming so late, I just need complete separation.  For my own sake, and probably for theirs too.

My other fear is that I’ll get too hung up on the specifics and lose sight of the larger realization here.  I need to watch my new friendships to make sure I don’t fall into the same habit of depending on them to validate my views and actions, and this has already proven itself to be difficult.  It’s a fine line between trust and dependency, between an exchange of values and an amalgamation of short-comings.

A life too isolated runs the risk of becoming solipsistic.  No outside information or reality checks can lead to a skewered perspective and a me-against-the-world attitude.  But a life of co-dependency can lead to similar pitfalls.  Concepts and definitions are constantly renewed and validated by the same source, and you lose any valid reality check just as easily.  It becomes us-against-the-world.  Progress can be made in groups, but not until you’ve truly defined yourself on your own, and can maintain that identity without outside reinforcement, or conversely, without bitterness for the lack thereof.

There was no hard feelings with the old friends, and I wish them the best of luck.  They’re smart, they’re good people, and they’re constantly working on bettering themselves, and I know without a doubt they will deal with the issue I just dealt with eventually, just like I’ll have to deal with some of the issues they’ve dealt with first.

And I don’t mind that they think I’m making this all up, or that this is all an extension of my issues and mine alone.  For the first time ever, I can actually truthfully say, I don’t care what anyone thinks of me.  I value information, but only as objective information.  It’s time for me to truly discover who I am, to me.  It’s time to define myself.  To be self-sufficient.  To live a life that is mine.  It’s time to once and for all take control of my life.

And here I go.