When we met, she had lost her keys and had deep concerns about something or another related to her apartment. What did I do, idiot that I was? I invited her to stay on the couch of my new one bedroom apartment until she got things sorted out. For some ten years after that, my various couches were her life rafts in between the good points of her life, mostly when she had a man in it, and her bad points, when she did not have a man in it.
One day, instead of being what she viewed as the supportive listening kleenex providing friend, when I had issues of my own (and like everyone out there I have them all the time, but I try with only few exceptions I have regretted, to keep them away from others), I was abrupt with her. This sent her into a roil. I had slapped her in the face. I had failed to be whatever perfect thing I was projected to be. She threatened suicide in the walk in closet off my living room, and when I said that I would feel terrible about that, she said that it upset her that it was "all about me." She was outta here. Except she did not leave. She stayed until the next day after a good night's sleep and a shower.
Her therapist, she reported, told her that I had issues, and I "must have gotten something out of the relationship." Both were true, in their way, but wow, talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Naturally, if she were telling the story, I would be the villain of the piece. And for a long time that bothered me because I was hung up on objective truth back then. Still am, but now I have decided that my perceptions are at least as valid as anyone else's. And, if they are invalid? Well, so what? Truth has little meaning so I can create my own reality just like everyone else does.
I can tell you this though, you will always lose in the reality of that person out there who consumes you and then spits you out. The trick then is to avoid such people like a plague. Not always easy because other suckers introduce you to them and say, "She or he is such a nice person" and then you discover that while they may have this good heart buried in there somewhere, they wreak havoc on you in every conversation, in every encounter.
I have gotten better at spotting and avoiding such characters, but not inerrant and my desire to who knows what--ego boost?--the Djinn saves those whom others cannot--I do not truly know, except I know saying "no" to people has always been hard. Another priest I know who I have taken lectures from said that his mother used to say, "If you can't say something nice about someone, be vague." I know from my time being a trainee therapist that if someone is not ready to hear the difficult things about his or her responsibility for what is happening, nothing you can say will break that wall and allow logic in, so in order to deflect what you have to be is "hard". And I don't like being hard, which is another one of the contradictions of my life given I spent 25 years telling lawyers what I thought they had done "wrong" and prosecuting some of them. I really don't care what people do or don't do personally, although I do care about the mass destruction they reap and to my dying day I do think there is a right and a wrong objectively and situationally, despite my flippancy in earlier paragraphs. I have selected areas of life where I had to be the one to say, "you can't do this or you should do this" because I truly believe it to be so, but not because I relish the idea of telling anyone anything. In fact, I could easily be a hermit and avoid ever encountering anyone who asks for advice or doesn't ask but wants me to agree with them whatever they say.
I used to think that trying to "help" such souls was part of being a Christian--you know something I heard once, "seeing Christ in His most distressing disguises", but recently I heard a priest who is also an expert on twelve step say that this is NOT charity and that we are NOT doing good for such people when we allow this.
This issue has sort of popped up in my life again, ever so recently, and so it's been back on my mind and pours out here Hopefully, one day I will learn the difference between helping and enabling--and me with a law degree, years of experience with manipulative lawyers and complainants--lawyers who stole oodles of money and countered with "This is not a Bar matter" and the oldie but goodie "you are engaging in prosecutorial misconduct", and two years as a trainee therapist, and several unpleasant interactions in which I ALWAYS ended up the bad guy.
Perhaps apropos of nothing, I have also been distracted by animal related crises. I took my little old Elwood cat to the vet's for official diagnosis at 500 plus dollars of hyperthroidism or cancer or cardio myopathy or some such. At least after having his ears cleaned out he is back here seemingly content while I await the test results. And it really is all about him--and he deserves it!
Back to the subject du jour, in closing. We live and we learn, and as I write a memoir that I may or may not publish, I realize how much I too have looked to the external world as the source of my crises of days long gone by, when so much was my own doing. I think I am ahead of the game realizing that finally. Of course there is no doubt someone out there who will say, "Really? Doesn't she know that she's still a big pain in the a--?" Geez, I hope I'm not. And I guess I'll never know the objective truth of it. Oh, well.
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