Discover your backbone or grow a fresh one otherwise others will find it easy to roll you out like a doormat. -- BAGGAGE RECLAIM
I'm sure that the chosen icon makes it look like I am suffering romantic disappointment. I am not. At least there is nothing current. Romance is something that I gave up on long ago. However, I came to discover that friendship can also involve betrayal that hurts just as bad. I also find myself wondering why I don't get over things that a "normal" person would have had done with long ago.
After four months I'm still hurting over a betrayal by someone I considered a friend for a number of years. It is evident that this person never considered me a friend, just someone whose ideas they could utilize for their own purposes. Why I'm not emotionally strong enough to simply cut such a passive-aggressive and ultimately toxic individual out of my mind and heart as I know would be most healthy is a complex thing which goes back to early childhood.
This is not the first such betrayal in my life. I have a long history of inviting in unstable people who I believe are kindred spirits because like me they are artistically expressive in some fashion, and like me, they are also damaged goods in some fashion. But there the similarity ends. These "friends" tend to be angry and have developed a world view where they do not have friends, only tools in human form that they utilize as it pleases them and then dispose of when it no longer pleases them. They have no conscience about behaving this way.
When one hears of such a person one generally thinks of somebody who puts themselves in the position of a lover. They seduce someone, use them sexually until the initial bloom is off the rose, then toss them aside. The victim of this game ends up wondering what they did wrong, believing that if only they were not so flawed their beloved would not have betrayed them this way.
However, such betrayals also happen in friendships and other partnerships. While the sense of betrayal lacks the romantic component, in many ways it is no less painful. It does leave lasting scars. The victim of the betrayal is still left thinking "if I weren't so flawed, they wouldn't have abandoned me."
That this feeling pervades even when logic dictates that the supposed friend/trusted partner was really never a friend and never should have been trusted speaks to someone who was betrayed at an early age in some fashion or another. It is not necessary at this time to go into what the betrayals were in my case. But they were there, and from an early age I learned that I was not "good enough" to warrant real friends. I always latched onto anything pretending to be friendship, only to learn that I had attracted another sour vampire needing to feed his or her ego.
I always learn in the end that once you cease feeding the ego of such individuals, they are done with you. They don't have friends. They have components. Everyone in their life fits into the machine they have built to boost their own ego. Once any of these components questions their actions or does not express adulation, they remove the component as easily as they throw out a broken appliance. The emotions of others do not matter to them.
This wouldn't matter if the only people they brought into their lives were at best casual acquaintances. Then the worst that would happen should they give said acquaintance the brush-off would be a bit of a sting which would eventually give way to thoughts such as "what a total fucking tool!" on the part of the cast-off.
When the sour vampire latches onto people who are damaged and desperate to find friends, the outcome is more severe. The "what a fucking tool" thought is still there, but it is complicated by thoughts of "if I weren't such a loser, so and so would still be my friend," and "I know that this person is a jerk, but I wish I didn't know that so we could still be friends." Rather than being a minor injury that is forgotten when the bruise or cut heals, the seemingly minor insult is much deeper than it appears on the surface and leaves a scar on the psyche.
The psyche of a person who has confidence in his or her self-worth is less likely to be scarred by the actions of such vampires. A person with confidence is also likely more likely to see the vampire for what he or she is from the beginning and deal with them only superficially if at all.
The walking wounded, on the other hand, tend to be so desperate for friendship that they overlook glaring red flags trimmed in neon revealing the true nature of their "friend." If it doesn't reflect in the mirror and has an aversion to holy symbols, it's probably a vampire. A person with a whole psyche recognizes this immediately. A wounded soul will rationalize, even to the point of saying "so what if he/she is a vampire. They're different from all the other vampires I've been hurt by in the past!"
I don't know if I'll ever learn to like myself anywhere near enough to stop letting the vampires in. I'm hoping that this most recent incident of betrayal will be the last. I'm hoping that in the future I'll recognize the red flags for what they are and say "no more vampires."
The problem is for someone like me that I crave more than superficial connections. Yet it is too dangerous to have any connection that goes deeper.
The vampires, either consciously or subconsciously recognize this. And so they come in and feed.
I'm tired of being a victim. I wonder if I've finally learned how to recognize a vampire so I will not be one again.
It's not his fault that he's a blood-sucking fiend from beyond the grave...right?
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