Thoughts Before I Turn 36...

.:Thoughts Before I Turn 36...:.

It's a few days before my birthday - one that I have zero plans of celebrating.

It's been a rough few weeks for me lately. Work has been extremely challenging, and I can't say  I've been conducting myself as well as I should have. Things have been going in extreme disarray, and lately, things have been weighing on my mind again.

I re-watched Delamar's episode of Str8 Up about Friendship. That episode shouldn't really be much of a surprise, since I wrote that episode myself, but needless to say, it really left an impression on me - that inevitably, people lose friends. For one reason or another, they do. And it doesn't matter if there was a point in time where you were tighter than a rubber band around Shaq's thigh, there will simply be some friendships where if you are out of sight, you are out of mind.

And it's not like anyone owes you an explanation when that happens. In fact, it's better for you to assume that you just fell out of touch over time, because the alternative might actually be far worse. It's a reckoning you're afraid to make, because you're afraid of what you might end up finding out about yourself. Because the reality is, looking back, you haven't really been as good a person as you thought you were.

So best to assume that you're no longer friends because you just lost touch with each other and drifted apart, than to recognize that maybe the reason they're no longer friends with you is that they just needed to find an excuse, any excuse at all, to strike you off. Because you're a toxic person, and everything you touch withers. And the only people left are the people who are too busy to find the time to detoxify their timelines, or the even fewer people who can genuinely put up with you.

And because you're too afraid of that reckoning, you are left with no choice but to let things be as they are: you can't say "sorry" if you don't even know if that's why they left. You can't reach out and restart anything for fear of rocking the boat. All you're left is to wallow in self-pity because you're too cognizant of the fact they don't owe you an explanation to lash out, but you're also too sentimental to just let it roll off your back like you know you should.

So where does that leave me? Quite honestly, I don't know. A part of me wishes I could reach out and fix all those rifts, but I don't know if it's worth it anymore. It's why I was so looking forward to the fresh start being in America could afford me. Alas, that wasn't meant to be. So now that I'm back here, I feel stuck here. And I feel like my world just got so much smaller because I don't quite know if I can bring myself to just run into these people again and not be affected by it.

My circles feel smaller. My world feels smaller. And there's nothing I could do about it.