"until we all feel, we have enough things, to burn"
i've always had a difficult time saying no. saying no to people. saying no to things. saying no to work. saying no to anything. i'm a person who tries to give other people and other things the benefit of the doubt. and more often than not, it tends to screw me over.
as i'm getting older, i'm learning to say no as much as i can without it maybe screwing me over. although, at times, it will continue to fuck up my life. like that one time i said no at my last job and it played into my eventual demise with the company. that place was fucked with or without me and i saw it as a good thing.
i never said no when i was younger. i had a bad habit of treating friends who weren't very good to me better than how i treated myself. these friends would end friendships out of the blue for no reason (or a variety of reasons to be discussed at a later date) and come crawling back months or years later. and sometimes, i took them back. only to have the same thing happen again, and again, and again. i never fucking learned. i never understood how someone i thought was a friend could hurt me as much as they did.
i grew up and kept making the same mistakes with new friends, with old friends, and with dudes. until one day when it was about to happen, i said no.
there are 4 examples that stick out in my mind.
an acquaintance in high school had a thing for one of my friends. she would fuck around with every dude, including his friends, and not him. we kept in touch briefly after high school and then that ended for whatever reason. he goes through stages of adding/removing me as a friend on facebook for years. one day, he adds me back and confesses he's living in toronto with the girl. we hang out without the girl (because she already hates me) and things are fine. weeks later, i found out he (probably) stole some of my shit and had removed me from facebook. did i learn my lesson? nope, not yet. a little while later, he adds me back and tells me they broke up. i don't care. i don't even want my shit back. he goes back and forth deleting and trying to add me again until i finally said no and blocked him. i'm not sure what he wanted me to do for him, but i wasn't interested to have that kind of negativity in my life.
one of my better friends in high school did a similar thing, where she got really upset with me for saying something about a dude she was dating at the time. i have no idea what i said but apparently it was grounds for removing me from facebook without cause. when i finally noticed, i probably sent a message asking what the hell. she told me, i told her i didn't remember, and that was apparently it. by this time, she was already engaged to somebody else. i didn't care. i already knew this was the end of friendship and i'm pretty thankful for that.
i got pretty close to a friend after a year in university. the next year, we're hanging out and as far as i'm aware, things are just fine. i go home and don't hear from him for what seemed like a really long time. it's unusual, but maybe he's busy. he tells me he was mad at the way i left him the last time we hung out. he was mad because i didn't look at him when i was leaving. i don't even know what that means. he then goes on to tell me we were never friends. alright - we hung out every day for an entire year, but nope, we're not friends.
the last one is probably the worst one, because it's the broest bro doing bro things while not even being a bro. this dude i met through a friend and he became obsessed with me to the extent where he would make up fake profiles and send me horrible things. he didn't like me not being interested in him. little did i know at the time, he was one of the first of many dudes i would encounter who were exactly the same.
and maybe these people don't really have a purpose in my life. and whether i like it or not, they'll always try to come back to me. the trick is remembering i can say no at any time. and i don't owe shit to anyone who has hurt me before.
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