Too Difficult to Take Care of

Something unpleasant happened yesterday. Three really close male friends of mine, including Tanner wanted to get together. As we were about to move onto different phases of life and very unlikely won't be able to see each other for a long time, I thought the get-together thing would be our intimate moment. It turned out they invited a stranger and wanted to do another superficial meaningless gathering that made me feel very frustrated and decide not to go. We were in the same building the whole time but none of them called me or actually came for me; all the did was sending angry messages blaming me for this and that. That further made me disappointed because all I was asking was just anyone of them to come upstairs and invite me again.

So I saw them today at another gathering. I tried to explain how I felt and then cried, in front them, among hundreds of people. I didn't care whether other people saw it and I just lived in that moment, the moment when I was feeling sad. The dispute was kind of settled because I cried but one of them also said "none of us is your boyfriend and you can't expect us to do those things for you".

After some review of my life again I think I've figured out what's going on. I am someone who values friends more than my family. I can talk to my family about so few things; in front of my family I am always fine, always single. All they know is that I'm unhappy because I am a perfectionist at work; I demand straight A's and a high paying job and that's why I'm unhappy. They think they know too much about me but in fact they know so little. I have to be emotionless in front of my family; I barely cried in front of them. When I was very little, around 2 or 3 years old, I was crying at a hospital looking for my mom who was taking care of my younger brother under a surgery. My dad could not handle my emotions and lifted me to the window of the hospital and told me "I would drop you from this window if you don't stop crying".

As someone who grew up in emotional abuse and witnessed physical abuse I am constantly searching for new family, whether they're just friends or a romantic partner. The problem is most people did not go through what I did and they obviously do not value me more than their family. I don't know how to solve this problem. I can try to value my family more again but the trauma from the past still haunts me and their emotional shutdown is still there; it comes with too much pain. It takes many more years to form a cohesive group like those 5 in How I Met Your Mother. I can pull back some of the investments and wait until they feel I'm a family to them. But before that happens I will have to keep suffering from loneliness.

Then I recalled what Ivan told me when he broke up with me, "it's so difficult to take care of you. You need someone better to take care of you." Tanner also told me something similar when I told him I thought he was a bad friend, "You're sad a lot and that makes it difficult to be your friend. It requires much more effort to be your friend." Cato said the same thing when he broke up with me, "all the things you request are reasonable but I just don't feel like doing them".

I am able to take care of my emotions now; I feel them, let them out, and never suppress them. I also feel less guilty these days. Now I need to believe there is someone out there, bigger than who I am, and able to take care of both of us.

If my web of interpersonal relationships is like a ball, I am dropping the ball right now. It feels really tiresome to be the one holding the ball all the time. I shut down my Facebook. I don't initiate to arrange parties anymore. I want to know which ones of my friends are willing to pick up the ball before it goes off the cliff. If my Facebook friends really care about me, they would go through our mutual friends and find my email or LinkedIn very easily. That's why it doesn't scare me to go off from Facebook.