Read on Twitter
A hard thing that I've been working through, slowly, these past few years, is my shifting capacity to be an emotional resource for my friends. For a variety of reasons, I have historically prided myself on being a primary emotional resource for the people in my life.
Part of the reason was that my MAIN response to my own trauma was disassociation, which gave me a false sense that I had an endless capacity to hear about and process other people's traumas because I felt nothing! Feelings were a purely theoretical exercise for me.
But I have also come to realize that, as a closeted asexual person with a huge amount of anxiety around being left behind by friends as they entered romantic relationships, I strove to keep myself relevant by providing as much emotional labour as I possibly could.
I needed to prove my value, always, so that people would keep me around -- and that value I felt I could contribute was intense emotional processing, since other people seemed to need it and (I thought) it cost me nothing.
As I've worked further through my trauma and learned to stop disassociating, building the capacity to actually feel things in my body, my capacity for processing other people's feelings has gone way, way, way down. It exhausts me now in a way it never did before.
When I was processing this early on with a friend she told me that I would still have value as a person even if I never did anything for anyone else ever again, and WOW did I not believe her. But I'm slowly warming up to the idea that I don't have to prove my worth.
Interestingly, this isn't a big problem with my more recent friendships. The folks I've met and befriended since moving to Vancouver have made friends with the me who isn't all-trauma-bonding-all-the-time.
We have shared vocabularies for asking permission to talk about hard things. We have a sense of one another's boundaries and limitations. There's an ease in those friendships that I know has sometimes led me to neglect or ignore older friendships that lack that ease.
(A weird piece of this dynamic is absolutely that I make a very vulnerable podcast, which for some far-away friends has produced a vicarious sense of emotional intimacy that doesn't necessarily match the reality of our relationship.)
The challenge for me lately is to figure out how to reshape the boundaries in older friendships that I still value and desire but in which I can no longer play the same role. This is fucking hard to do, because my fear that people won't want me if I'm not an emotional resource?
That fear is sometimes borne out. The reality of learning and communicating your own boundaries is that sometimes people won't want that version of you. I'm learning to be okay with that.
This thinking was prompted by having to do some friendship renegotiation with a friend whose needs and my capacity aren't aligning any more. I feel like I've pulled a bait-and-switch, forging a relationship based in trauma-bonding and then changing my mind.
My fear that boundaries will make me un-useful and thus unlovable are very real and very present in these conversations, but I'm slowly learning to have them anyway. They're hard, but they're also deeply healing.
As other friends have pointed out, a big part of the challenge here is how little shared vocabulary and experience we have in negotiating the shifting forms of friendships. They're so often imagined as stable and enduring in comparison to romantic relationships.
Even in narratives that attend to and value friendships, the "happy ending" seems to be a return to a status quo of unlimited intimacy. The older I get, the more I realize how unrealistic this is. As I change, my friendships change. It's beautiful, and it's hard. /fin
