Wednesday, March 31, 2004

I have dinner every week with my very best friend, Miss K. It's sort of a ritual – we go to Hana and eat sushi and teriyaki chicken, and a portion of our conversations will frequently revolve around stuff like, "So, this certain event happened, and I thought it was really weird, but I wanted to hear what you thought about it." Because Miss K and I are very much on the same wavelength when it comes to sensing what we refer to as "psycho behavior".

Right now, for example, she has someone in her life who's struggling to kick drugs, and I have someone in my life who's just…struggling, on a lot of levels. Both Miss K and I are having to work pretty hard to not get sucked into their struggle and try to rescue them, because we are both major control queens who think that if only everyone would just do as we say, then everything would be all right.

I mean, we don't really think that, because we know better. And we know it based on bitter and bloody personal experience, so it's not a fact we'll be forgetting, uh-uh. But that reflex is there, and we have both have to stop ourselves from trying to fix things, because we can't, and we'll just wind up frustrated and emotionally drained.

So I told Miss K about the latest chapter of my struggling friend's story, and she told me about the most recent installments on her end, and we both agreed that boundaries were really fucking difficult things to maintain sometimes. But I'm so blessed to have her as a friend, because she understands me so perfectly about these kinds of things. I can tell her all the un-evolved, bad-boundary-esque things I really wish I could do around my struggling friend and her various problems, and she knows exactly what I mean. And then - glory hallelujah - I'm over it. I stop thinking about it, obsessing over what's not mine to change, and that's wonderful, because I don't need someone else's life, that I have no control over, taking up valuable real estate in my head.

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