Ouch

It really smarts to be hurt by a friend. In an effort to finally purge this hurt I'm going to write it out. I don't normally put personal complaints in my blog, but this is a big hurt and I need to put it out there.

I had a good friend tell me one thing, assure me of it, and then discreetly do the total opposite. The reason she even had something to assure me of is because it was something that I discovered and was doing first, she learned about it from me, and when she started doing it herself she gave me these assurances. When I first found out what she was planning I was shocked and hurt. It took me a few days before I could confront the situation and tell her how hurt I was. At first I didn't want to say anything, I'm not really sure why exactly this is, I guess I still wanted to trust what I had been told, and I knew confronting it would damage our friendship. But after a few days of stewing I realized that in respect to our friendship I had to say how much I had been hurt, the friendship on my end had already been damaged anyway. My issue was that I had been told one thing and then the opposite was done, without ever directly letting me know. I find it impossible to understand how a friend can tell you one thing, and slowly, over time, make plans for the total opposite without ever letting you know. With hindsight I could have seen it coming, but without hindsight I had no idea a friend would do something like that, so it didn't even occur to me. And if she would have told me along the way that she was starting to feel differently and would have talked to me about it, I would'nt have been hurt. But to make plans secretly and just leave me trusting what I had been told? I feel like I was fooled and played.

And the kicker, and biggest point of hurt, is that she never once acknowledged that she had not kept her word. Instead I had things from over a year ago brought up (and in the wrong context since she wasn't even involved in what she was referring to). I got told that I should have said something earlier... really? I'm not sure how I was supposed to address something that I didn't even know was happening. And I got told that the subject of it all was trivial and unimportant and not something that I should be upset about... but she knew it was important to me.

Wow, how sad huh? Not sad for me, but sad that someone can be like this and function like this. I guess I value my friendships differently. And I definitely trust my friends. If you are my friend and you assure me of something, I believe you. I find that to be a pretty basic part of a friendship.

And to top it all off I got a follow-up email a couple weeks after we had agreed to disagree and go our separate ways. In it I was told that she could no longer be a friend to me. Hahaha! Seriously!? she had to tell me that specifically? Even though we had pretty much established that, without directly saying it? I guess that just confirms even more that she totally didn't get why I was hurt in the first place. I think her main goal in telling me we were no longer friends was so that she could continue to go against her word... because by disbanding our friendship her word to a friend no longer matters, of course. ((eyeroll))

It's so sad to me it's almost laughable, except that it still hurts. In the long-run I think I'm glad this friendship ended when it did. Trust and support obviously didn't mean much from her end. And the crazy thing is, part of the reason I didn't want to vent this here, on my blog, my venting place, was that it would be hurting her. And then I realized that I was only hurting myself by keeping it all in. So there it is... out in the universe. Time for me to move on and to value the true and good friendships I already have.