Considering Friendship

I broke up with a friend.
It was nasty.
One of the nastiest of nasty ways that one could carry on with. It was despicable how comfortable I felt in abusing this person and she would say she didn't deserve it.

So I am putting this out there. Because its definitely one of the few things I will regret until I die. When you deliberately hurt someone it takes a toll on your psyche. On your psyche of good and the good you tend to believe you are capable of. I don't think most of us contemplate the scale of good that you may be willing to attest to but we always seem to know what we are capable right before the intense emotional pull of something good or bad actually happens.

We blame lots of things for our pain and then the subsequent pain we inflict on others...
-Parents
-The ideas surrounding Love
-Lack of Love
-Other peoples' actions
-Anger
-Chemical influence (alcohol, drugs, prescribed and un-prescribed medication)
-PMS
-Fear
-Fear of losing/failing
-Shame
The list is extensive but these are the ones I seem to be battling in my war zone of a mind.

Change, improvement, and prerogative make strange bedfellows when you have things to do that affect more than one person. Changing your lot/cards/direction takes courage and we chicken out most of the time. Which is why it pains us to see these extremes in others.

Sometimes the people who we believe in don't believe in themselves, the love that we have means nothing, the struggle for betterment and enlightenment stops being spiritual.

So by dabbling in my own evil, I discovered, that I, too am angry and bittter but getting better.
I, too, am disheartened but I keep hope alive by recognizing the beauty in myself and others.
I, too, tend to be disenfranchised by the things that really separate us like race, money, class, education.

Its very honest to think sometimes that you have a right to give yourself some credit for accomplishing the person that you are or the progress that you have made. That you have the right to be "better than" people who do not think like you, or love like you, or cry like you. Or who never tried as much as you tried and made something better of themselves.

You are not better than anyone, really. But your ego is real element of who you are and when you look around you and see that the mirror of "friends" that exists are sometimes people, you don't love or don't understand or don't appreciate or don't like...You end up with rage, anger and bad nerves. You end up with the will to unleash some of that negativity on people that you have little to no respect for.

So what the hell am I trying to say?

There are no excuses for being abusive.
There are none.
There are no go backs when you hurt someone even if you don't mean to.
And life... is give and take.
You have to find the balance...not to give too much or take too much. But love unconditionally when you feel capable. If you don't, you lose.

This discovery showed me (and now I am showing you) that most of the time, you are not who you think you are. We just tend to just scratch the surface of our highest good and our darkest evil and then follow what feels right. And even though there isn't anyone really who can judge us, we still have to figure out when the right feeling is safe, useful, necessary and then move forward.

There comes a time when you may very well have to move on but it doesn't require anything but your willing heart and change of mind. To consider friendship is to consider vulnerability, trust, sacrifice, understanding and love (like most relationships). If you are missing these things, then well, its over. Just don't go up in flames. Destroying your last memory. Because everything happens for a reason. Everything.