Toxic People

So what kind of blogger would I be if I didn't read other blogs? A bad one, duh. So I was reading a blog by a woman who's in journalism, kind of hated her husband for a bit, and was on a quest to be happy, much like myself (except I don't hate Ben). She, having gone through a life-Renaissance of sorts, I think is qualified to give someone like me advice on dealing with the adult world. She says to rid my life of "toxic people," i.e. people who make you feel worse after hanging out with them. Whilst this doesn't happen to me (or to anyone I would think) very much, it has happened, and does happen. Sometimes people in my life can have their toxic days, where I can't deal with them, but most of the time they're all right. But I can think of a few that have been persistently toxic. One is a friend I wouldn't want to slander electronically, because they have been there for me in the past, except now I'm not really sure we're the kindred spirits we used to be, and I've been thinking about this person and whether or not to label them "toxic," but I'm kinda sure this all related to the power plant of toxins that is my mom. It's probably not even their fault at all, really.

Confession: I have mommy issues. But as she's virtually withdrawn from the Internet after a recent fallout, I doubt she's stalked me enough to know I started this frivolous little thing. Anywho, reconnecting with my estranged mother has been, well, difficult. This is because she is a toxic person to me. I don't know if its the gratifying reversal of being all but worshiped after being abandoned for years, you know like the attention and stuff, or if its me martyring myself in some sick, weird way dealing with her obsession with us and weird combination of self-pity and self-loathing. Either way, I feel like a better person after seeing her, except kind of in the way that Harry Potter felt better going back to the Gryffindor common room after detentions with Professor Umbridge with "I must not tell lies" written in scars on the back of his hand.

Except my hand would say, "I must not tell truths," because if I have anything to bitch about (as is the way of 19-year-old girls) she'll somehow turn it against me and make it seem like I've been neglected by my family unit and am deeply psychologically disturbed for some reason. God, I'm so sick of people thinking I'm crazy, just because I was a little crazy as an early teenager. And I admit by a little crazy I mean a lot crazy. I just hid behind being "unique" to feel like that was the source of my "tortured" persona, you know, like, artist-crazy. Turns out I'm not much of a composer, dancer or singer (though, as evidenced in my last post, these things still make me very happy), and I know I shouldn't have alienated people to try to be an introverted-genius-type. But here's the thing: You can make these mistakes because you don't know any better, and some people will still act like you should have. There was too much crazy bleeding into my life from all sides during middle school and early high school that I didn't really notice I wasn't developing socially.

But don't pity me. Because that's what my mom would ask you to do, but I won't, because I don't need it. I feel like this is one of those things I think about a lot, so I should explain it now, mom and middle school and being a "Fatty No Friends" for almost two years of my life. And it was me. All me. And there's no one else to blame, so I'm not going to blame anyone. But I have to confess to my self-absorbed blog that I'm still really torn between yearning to be friends with the people I spent so much time with in high school and middle school so much that it makes me sickened to think that I had all that time to make a few people like me and I failed, and the alternative, snobbishly rejecting them because I go to a really competitive school, dress pretty cute, and still have the boyfriend I so triumphantly won and kept in high school. By keeping this facade of utter perfection when I go home, I protect myself from them thinking anything bad about me, maybe the worst being, "she walks like she's the shit." And Beyonce says I should. So I try.

I feel like I have a lot better things to talk about in this blog than these sad little vignettes about reconstructing my life by looking to my dramatic sordid past. But the thing that's getting to me about my friend is the fact that they aren't thinking about their emotions, and their reasons for being the way they are now, which is so different even from when I first met them, relatively recently. If you can't think about these things, and to look at them from an un-depressed, thoughtful, interested standpoint its like ignoring the owners' manual to your own personality. Why do specific things make you upset? What do you regret? What are you out to prove and why? I could really go into it and dig for my deep psychological trauma, and so could everyone, even the most privileged of people. But I'll spare you, because as long as you know how you are now, it doesn't matter how you were then.

And thank god for that. Because I don't need a fanfic-writing, lonely-soul, constantly philosophizing revival of what I used to be. She was fun, but I let her go. Like shaved-head Britney Spears, I just prefer myself now that I've kind of got it together.