State of Me: Disillusionment

This year has been a terrifying and eye-opening one; I am becoming and I don't know how to word who or what I am becoming yet. I've spent many months now thinking through these things and I share my thoughts with you now. I will try to keep them brief. If they are not brief, I ask your forgiveness.

For most of this year, I've lived with varying groups of people that would identify me with labels like "friend", "bro", "bestie" and so on. With those labels in place, it would shock me when I would see the way people behaved with no regard for my thoughts, feelings or opinion. If you're a reader of this blog, you may know of the situation simply because we've spoken about it. Others may not know and if you don't, that's fine for now. The point here is that I managed to learn things from those experiences.

• People care less about you than how you make them feel.  It was during that time that someone posed to me that these people may not care about them as much as they liked the things I did and the way I made them feel; I was kind and usually extended whatever I had in order to help others. In return, very little was given back to me and usually the things asked were not tangible things or things that would ultimately benefit me. It did not matter. I learned that I was an object and a resource to be tapped into. I counted for nothing else. While these words may sound harsh, so state them in any other way would be a lie.
• The nature of the people in this world is to take advantage. Related to the previous point, if someone knows that I care for them, it seems to be the pattern that they find me when they need help and at no other time.
• Nothing matters more than my peace. In the process of pursuing lasting peace in my own home, I have effectively evicted people and have cut off about half of the relationships that I had hoped would develop into something greater. I have decided that the loss is worth it and that if my home is the only place I am guaranteed peace in this world other than my grave, I will have peace. No relationship to a person that unsettles my peace will survive or remain in my life. Period. I will uproot every relationship in my life if I must in order to maintain that one thing.
• I can be the king. My friend stated it this way: "in a home with roommates, you can be one of two people: the king or the mother. The king is the one who commands obedience and allegiance from those around him because, ultimately, they want his favor and realize they need him and he does not need them in order to survive. The mother gains an elevated status, but tends to be ignored when expressing grievances because people believe that this person's compassion will win out and therefore there are no real consequences for angering this person; "a mother would never abandon her children." I was the mother at that time. After meditating and chewing on the thought for a while, I decided I wanted to be a king. While my friend may have been right about the roles, he was wrong about not being able to change them. I most certainly did. So much so that I went from having 5 roommates and 3 people couch-surfing to having two and only two roommates.
• Compassion must be guided. It sucks to even have to say that, but my acts of compassion can rarely if ever be spur-of-the-moment in the future no matter what or who it involves. The idea of "once bitten, twice shy" is applicable here, but more than that, if I want to be able to love people well for the rest of my life, I have to be a bit more discerning about how I apply it. Right now, that means that I'm going to have to step back from it in a large way and sort these things out. After that, I'll slowly enter that arena again.

Aside from that, I've seen the ugliest of ugly in people. No one really seems to love anyone. Mind you, I was forewarned about these types of things, but it is never less shocking to me that people can be so callous to people they claim to care about. I can't even go into details, but the sheer volume of examples, whether big or small, is mind-blowing; who the hell treats their friends/family/lovers the way I've seen people treat theirs this year and somehow manage to still say the words "I love you" and feel that they mean them? Seriously, HOW DO THEY SLEEP AT NIGHT? Yet, I ask this question knowing the answer is that they don't care. They don't care and they will not care in the future and I have to sit down with that fact and become intimately acquainted with the idea that there are almost 6 billion people that feel the exact same way.

I suppose disillusionment is the word for this, but I'm not sure whether I'm actually disillusioned, or finally willing to throw in the towel on hoping for the best instead of just succumbing to what currently is. It's not like I have forgotten love...

...but there's a really narrow effing scope.

In other news, I've thought more about my writing. I miss it. I even long for it at times. At the same time, it will never be as it was before and there are a lot of reasons for that. Namely, the person I left when I stopped writing is never coming back and now this new me will have to carry on with it. That works, I guess.