Monday, Oct. 18
3:40pm CST
Dateline: somewhere between Las Vegas and Dallas
Funny, isn’t it, how spending a few days away from home and outside my comfort zone rarely fails to help me mentally zero in on what’s important?
I’ve just spent three days in Vegas with a dear friend from college, and in the wake of spending some serious quality time in the presence of someone who understands and cares about me… well. It just really makes me wonder how many Jens there actually are in my life … how many people who I’ve let into my inner circle over the years could spend three days with me after 11 years apart and have it go that well? I doubt there are many.
I feel like anything I might say now — about reflecting on who’s stayed in touch while I’m out of town, or about how I crave something more meaningful than the relationships I have in my life right now — well. These are things I feel like I’ve been saying for weeks, if not months, now, and repeating them now would be terribly redundant and, let’s face it boring. So I won’t go on ad nauseum about things we all already know well. Instead, let me give myself a little pep talk here.
The thing is, Liz, you know in your heart what you want to do. You know the path forward and you recognize, when you allow yourself to be completely honest with yourself (which, granted, isn’t often) that the path you’re on right now isn’t the right path. Not at all. You want more — and you deserve more. You want the people in your life to be people who reach out to you from time to time, as well as responding in kind when you do the same. You want people who are giving, thoughtful, and caring. You want to surround yourself with people who are there for you, even when they’re busy. Who would entertain giving up their long-established plans just so you don’t have to take a cab home from the airport. People who consider you a partner in life, even if that partnership is strictly platonic. And you want the people who are more than platonic to make you a priority.
You know what this means … and you know what it means you must do, how you must organize your life. It’s easy to convince yourself that the less-involved relationships that, honestly, dominate your life, well, that they’re not taking anything away, and that having a casual friendship with someone you adore (love?) is better than not having them in your life at all. But is it? That seems to me, right now, to be an open question. New relationships don’t need immediate definition, but people who’ve been around long enough to know you well should be on board…. or they should move on, because you know, in your heart, that when you allow someone access to your life, you give up a part of yourself to that relationship, in whatever form it takes. You don’t have casual ANYTHING. You give away pieces of yourself, and when those pieces get given to someone who’s unwilling to give back in kind, it leaves you feeling empty and insecure and jealous. And you deserve more. You deserve so, so, so much more. You deserve someone who’s going to fill you up, not let you down. And most of all, you deserve someone who deserves you — not someone who falls short in important and meaningful ways.
It’s genuinely time to let go of the need to keep people around for the sake of having them around. There are people who make an effort to be a part of your life, and those people should be the ones with whom you spend your time, to whom you give away little pieces of yourself, for whom you’re willing to make sacrifices and compromises and all of that. Doing those things for anyone who cannot do the same lessens what you have available for those who will. They deserve your best.