So as soon as I set out to write a series of book reports -- a series of anything, really -- life slammed in on me. There's a bunch of stuff colliding messily in my head right now, which makes it difficult to get any of it out. I've been limping along, but I really need to get better at determining in advance what things I need to drop and when, rather than letting it get to the point where I just need to let the next thing fall, no matter what it is. In the meantime, I've given up, called out of the one thing I thought I was going to get accomplished today, and am holed up in my room to try and get some of this shit done.
One of the things eating my attention is that a friend is going through a messy breakup. Or, rather, she should be going through a messy breakup, but she refuses to let go of her horrible abusive relationship. The details are unimportant, but, as Dr Nerdlove says, assholes gonna ass. Every time it happens -- which is often -- she runs to us, her friends, for "advice" and "support". Except the only advice she's getting is DTMFA, which she refuses to follow, and all of our support is vanishing into a great sucking black hole of insecurity, until she scrapes together enough willpower to wade right back into her horrible relationship and try again.
It has become apparent that she will not break out of this cycle herself. It's working for her, for a certain awful definition of "working". Her priority isn't maintaining healthy connections with other people; it's raking in as much emotional attention as possible, in an effort to fill the gaping hole she feels where her self-worth should be. The emotional abuse she's copping from her partner is irrelevant in the moment, because she's getting the external validation of someone "choosing" her. Then it all crashes in and she comes crying to us, getting people to sit on the phone with her for hours, reassuring her that she's not a garbage human and of course we love her.
She keeps coming to me and I have no idea why, because all I tell her is that her partner is an asshole, block buttons exist for a reason, and she's making a lot of incredibly goddamn stupid choices here.
Bad choices don't make you a bad person, but she's being an incredibly dysfunctional person right now, and the help she needs is way above my pay grade. She has a therapist, whom I have told her to call, but evidently does not have an emergency number for either the office or an affiliated crisis service. Given that she's also been admitting to a worrying level of substance use and self-harm, this suggests that either her therapist is not very good at their job, or she's not telling them the same thing she's telling her friends.
I have sympathy for her, but not a lot of patience. I have told her point-blank that I am happy to talk to her about literally anything else if she wants a distraction, but I will not discuss her horrible abusive relationship anymore. The next time she starts, she is going into Facebook jail for 24 hours, where I will not talk to her at all, plus an additional 24 hours for every offense after the first. Basically, continuing to make bad choices will get her the opposite of attention from me.
Evidently, she has no other topics of conversation, as she hasn't contacted me since. She's posted a couple of memes about having rejection sensitive dysphoria, which I also sympathize with. Some things can hit me weirdly hard. But as far as I'm concerned, that's a good explanation for why I should give her extra time and space to deal with disappointment, not a reason to put up with endless cycles of things that are frankly not my problem. Especially if you ask me how to solve it, ignore my answer, and then come back complaining that doing nothing didn't work.
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