How to Lose Someone Important to You

Shut them out

Communication is key, and non-communication is an even better key! If you do find yourself in a situation where you are opening up and communicating, be sure to have a supply of things that come up that you can use to avoid any further communication. Emotional neglect and giving the bare minimum is also a good way of letting them know how clingy they’ve been.

Ignore apologies. What matters more is how much they hurt you, instead of a willingness to overcome that hurt. After all, apologies admit weakness, and you need someone stronger than that in your life.

Tell them you need to Process. And by Process, it means distract yourself with all sorts of other bullshit, hanging out with friends, closing down the bar, or doing literally anything else besides Processing. Your toxic friends will provide the right throwaway piece of advice your way because their lives are so stellar. Prefereably in meme or motivational quote form. Or wine.

Don’t box me in! Accuse them of lumping you in with their past while following textbook behaviors demonstrated by people in their past. Because all of us are a completely blank page who shouldn’t rely on past experience to inform us that things are about to implode. Especially if your own self-destructive patterns are right on schedule and obvious to anyone who knows you. There’s nothing worse than being lumped in with your own past behavior!

Remind them they hurt your trust: Tell them in very long text messages that there is nothing they can do to regain that trust. Make sure to repeat this process every week so they know you can never regain your trust. Repeat as often as it takes to explain in excruciating detail how they will never regain your trust. And how there is nothing they can do to fix it. Ever.

When you hurt yourself, make sure they see it. Even the closest people to us in our lives can’t withstand watching us dismantle all the progress we’ve made in our lives. Even the ones who love us will show their true colors when they watch you go off the rails and have to Step Away. Sad choices are the comfort food of emotional healing.

Push away the people who love you most. These people won’t always say what you want to hear. They see good in you, potential, and they will call you out when they are watching you hurt yourself. Being called out hurts, so why let other people hurt you when you are already an expert? If they decide to step back and let you do this, that’s on them.

Orbits are better than emotional investment. Why have one sure thing (that is sure to fail) when you can have four or five people in orbit around you that combine to make at least 1&3/4 of a sure thing! Like old scraps of cloth for quilters, or keeping a jar of bolts and screws, at some point they will serve some kind of purpose. Look at how much emotional support you get too! And if you want, you can always get laid.

ABA: Always be assuming! Actually talking to the other person rarely accomplished anything. You know they are talking shit about you with their friends! What about that song they put on their Facebook! It was a dig! Fuck them! Why aren’t they texting back? Why did they text back?! What are they saying about me??!!

Change the nature of your relationship. Always roll back the nature of your relationship. After all, don’t all people who are “just friends” do these kinds of things with each other? You’ve probably got half a dozen “friends” who stuck around for the breadcrumbs you’ve been throwing them. Hell, they probably told you how much of an asshole this person was too (they are totally objective, btw). If they read too much into things, that’s on them!

Here are some examples of rolling back:

• Parent = Sperm/Egg donor
• Valuable employee = Former person in that position
• My dream job = What I wanted to do when I grew up
• Lover = Friend with benefits
• Fuckbuddy = Somebody who keeps bugging me
• Boy/Girlfriend = An old friend
• The One = Someone I used to hang out with
• The One who got away = That motherfucker

Commiserate with enablers

• People who still want to bang you: You’d be surprised to know how supportive someone you used to sleep with will be when you are in a crisis. You’ll soon see that you were right! It was the other person’s fault entirely! What a good listener.
• Just any random person: They will see things only through their lens and if you curate the information you give them, it’s pretty certain they will see things your way. If they don’t, then there are other random people to commiserate with.
• Have a heart to heart with the most toxic person in your life: You’ll see how honest, supportive, and hopeful for your well-being someone is who has completely fucked up the lives of others for their own amusement. This person might have also come pretty close to endangering your safety, your job, and never showed any remorse for dragging you into their drama. Your pain couldn’t possibly just be entertainment for them.

The Process of Healing

Take the high road. Don’t unfriend them. Don’t get angry. Don’t express your frustration. Tell them they are important to you without actually trying to fix anything. You’ll be the good guy. And if there is a good guy, then somebody is the bad guy. Especially when they unfriend and block you, because that’s what bad guys do.

Self-medicate. Spend more time at the bar, or drinking at home. You know, rather than spending an evening hashing things out with someone who you considered important in your life. Alcohol and drugs are great ways to numb any real feeling you might have.

Use your words. Or rather use someone else’s words, and motivational pictures, and TikTok videos, because there is no better way of expressing how you feel than sending someone what somebody else has said about what they feel.

Build walls, not boundaries. Boundaries keep the toxic people out. But walls keep everyone out! At some point everyone will betray you, so build those walls thick and high.

Second chances. The second chances already got used up by everyone else who came before. Their first chance was already their second chance. Or third. Or fourth.

Write your feelings down

Write passive agressive shit about them on the internet. Get angry with them. Write where you know they will see it. Make it bitter. Put it down in words that can’t be unsaid, that will damage the trust between you that was already broken because why the hell not? You didn’t know the secret combination to their heart–Right 26, Left 17, Right 4–to open it. Or was that the combination? Did they even know what it was? How were you supposed to?

What have you got to lose? They walked out of your life. Say the thing. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to be mean. It won’t win them back. You lost them a long time ago.

Even though you still love them, even though you want someone who comes home instead of just comes over, even though you know that things can’t go back to how they were, but you can’t help but wonder how things ever were anymore, not now, you don’t trust that anything was real anymore and what was just playing out a fantasy that you wanted and thought they did too. Maybe your finger still itches from where you used to wear their ring. Maybe you still haven’t taken it off. Maybe you see pieces of them in someone else’s smile or laugh. Or when you are scrolling through your phone and you see a picture of them staring right back at you and have to look away because it fucking hurts. Maybe you hear their Name and think about how that special word used to play on your tongue, how you would sometimes say it, just to feel how it felt in your mouth. This is what you get for making plans or daring to daydream. For going past the routine and comfort zones and experiencing actual growth instead of replaying old reruns.

Was it all just a waste of time? Why let anyone get close, ever? Is this why we can’t have nice things?

Sitting there second-guessing your gut. Second-guessing the second-guessing. Keeping your mouth shut even when they were screaming all the warnings at you and waving the red flags and you just watched them drift away. Even when they told you you were overthinking. When they said to stop fishing for assurances. When something was off, but fit perfectly with their old patterns which you had watched before. And yet you had to be right instead of being happy, didn’t you? When you mistook that moment they reached out as wanting you again instead of just…

Stop. Breathe.

Take time to sit in this mess and acknowledge that sometimes things aren’t healthy and that you did enough. You were enough. You were courageous. The only shame you really felt was not feeling worthy of connection with someone who disconnected. Paranoia never brought you happiness. Overthinking is self-harm, just as much as cutting, drinking too much, suicidal thoughts, or alienating yourself from those who truly love you and care about you.

Vulnerability made you beautiful. In spite of your trauma you decided to trust. And you’ll do it again. And again. But each time that weight will be heavier and there are fewer years ahead of you now and we aren’t promised tomorrow. And we are all a little beat up at this age. It doesn’t get any easier.

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It’s how the light gets in

Sometimes it’s hard to write in this blog, considering how personal it can be. Really hard to write. I agonize over what I should share and what I shouldn’t. When you write, there is a fine line as to what is self-exploitation and what is getting the story told. The story really doesn’t care much about the writer. It just uses us, day and night, until it is told, or it kills us. So, there is some debate. Sometimes I overshare.

The other day I watched a Brenee Brown YouTube where she says, “Vulnerability without boundaries is not vulnerability.” That’s just a smack in the face with a cold fish to hear someone put it that way. I think of some of my favorite pieces of literature. The books Unbroken, or Wild, or the poetry of Leonard Cohen, Pablo Neruda, Silvia Plath, or countless melancholy bands that I love to listen to on a dark night when the rain is tapping on the windows. TV shows like Fleabag, movies like Good Will Hunting, the Razor’s Edge, or so many others.

I have to gauge what my boundaries are. I’ve read several Townsend and Cloud books. There’s nothing in there about how to set boundaries for a writer. I don’t share everything on the page, and often the words I put down are done to serve the story. Though at times, the details and the emotions may seem exploitative. It’s a form of expression. A very deep and intimate one you share with your readers–whether or not you know them. Someone close to me once told me that I needed to write unafraid. To keep telling the story.

So I’m going to share a story. It’s a love story.

It was probably one of the last beautiful nights of the summer. Nobody uses the phrase Indian Summer anymore, not only because of how sensitive everyone has become about being culturally sensitive, but also because the last two years has made the change in seasons pretty much meaningless. It was a cool night, but not cold. I pulled a kitchen chair onto the sidewalk in front of my apartment. I put on my fedora and my recent playlist and lit up a cigar which I smoked until long past sunset.

A couple summers ago, this was a ritual for a Friday night with someone I was dating. She introduced me to cigars and it is one of the bad habits I don’t regret. What other vice forces you to sit down for 45 minutes to an hour and just do nothing else. It is meditative. Which is often what I do as I draw the fragrant smoke into my mouth and exhale it as phantasmagoric tendrils of white smoke into the night air. It is therapeudic.

She and I used to sit in front of the firepit, sipping whiskey or wine, eating cheese, smoking cigars, and just chatting about life. Our relationship lasted only about nine months. It took me a long time to get over her. I had friends who sat with me in that grief and made me feel safe. They reminded me that I was worthy of being loved, even if she was gone. Someone who loved me so hard, but still left.

That night, I thought of her clearly for the first time in almost a year. Gone was the grief. It was laid bare and I missed only the company we shared. I have had no desire to seek her out for over a year. I held up my drink and toasted her. I felt gratitude for those moments and was happy to remember them. I wished her happiness and hoped she too was enjoying a night like this, maybe with a man she was in love with, or her big family, or maybe just by herself. I still carry a love for her inside my heart, without feeling that pull of regret for things having ended.

The next day was rough.

I need to finish work on the house and I have been procrastinating. It’s almost like a feeling that if I finish it, I won’t have anything left to distract me from my problems. Upcoming court hearings, work, relationships, family, etc. The house has been good for distraction, but I’m at a point where I have only a few things left. Right now I see only the flaws of a DIYer. I still see a lot of work ahead of me. Which eventually needs to be done.

I drove to get supplies. It beat sitting in the house with my thoughts and worries and pieces of my life which I feel like I have been holding onto like sand. The tighter you squeeze, the more slips through your fingers. Not even the three hour round trip could ease my racing mind. Nothing seems to help. Not alcohol or binge watching TV shows or playing hours of fetch with the dog.

I haven’t been sleeping lately. Last night I got two hours of sleep. I’ve been shaky and not wanting to be social at all. (Posting this will be the end of a two day self-imposed communications blackout.) My cough is back again. So I took a nap, or tried to.

It was in the liminal space between sleep and being awake that I realized a lesson I was on the verge of learning on that last night of summer. Nobody asks us to love them or stop loving them. Love doesn’t mean getting your way. It offers no guarantees. It is not something that allows you to control someone or make them feel shame that they don’t love you enough or in the way you might expect.

That isn’t how it works.

It wakes you up in the morning. It sings and rocks you to sleep. It keeps you close when everything feels like it has cracked and broken. It sends pens to scratching on the surface of notebook pages, bleeding out ink like blood onto the page. It calms you down and helps you breathe. It can also kill you if you hold it in, just as sure as an anuerism.

In its truest form, love lasts long after we are gone. When everything else has broken down and been washed away, it stands on its own. It doesn’t demand anything. It doesn’t incite jealousy. It allows you to recapture joy from a single moment sometimes that meant something. It’s enough to push back the night that feels so cold and endless. Whether it is hearing the laughter of a baby who is grown up and gone away, or a first kiss and long embrace of a lover, or a grandmother fussing at you as she cooked you bacon, or a pet who never left your side when you were sick, it is always going to be with you.

It is stronger than we give it any credit for being. It is like gravity. It never goes away when it is real, no matter how much we might wish we could forsake it. Like a story, it is independent of ourselves, though we can draw upon it. It outlives us because we pass on the love we have to others and they get to carry it with them.

I’ve heard the phrase “It takes a while to unlove somebody.” I don’t think this is possible. We just let the grief teach us something, but we can never unlove someone once we have loved them.

Ring the bells that still ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack
a crack in everything
It’s how the light gets in
It’s how the light gets in

Leonard Cohen, Anthem

That crack is what happens when we grow. It hurts. It sucks. And it feels like it’s going to kill us. But the love we receive is the light that gets in. We get to keep it, even if the ones who brought it are gone. Until we are ready to give it to someone else.

So, when I think of what Brenee Brown said about boundaries and vulnerability, I probably should have just kept this revelation to myself. But if it sets just one person’s mind at ease and gets them through a rough patch like the ones I’ve had lately, I’m prepared to argue that with Ms. Brown. And with me will stand every poet, artist, writer, musician, and anyone else who has ever expressed the abundance of feeling from that cracked vessel they call their hearts.

I guess the right you have to sharing this story with me is that you are here and you are reading. Even if some might consider it oversharing.

The moment you let love in is a moment when you feel at peace. I hope this helps.

Thank you.

Starting over and over

Today was a day with a lot of resistance. I’ve been re-reading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and trying to get myself set in what I need to do to write. Jeez, that’s all I talk about, you might think. Writing. It’s because I love it. It also scares the hell out of me. Mostly because I respect what good writing is and I hope in some way I am achieving that. For those of you who don’t write, I hope that you can appreciate any other substitution for a passion that doesn’t alienate you.

I share these words not just for you, but because I am in the process of manifesting everything that I want.

I am 46 years old. A little bit long in the tooth to still be following my dreams, some might think. By now, most of my friends are looking at the coast and glide of being at least over halfway through their careers. Things like 401ks and hedge funds might mean something to them. Some are thinking of retirement. And here I am starting over again.

I had to start over from zero a few times in the last few years. The first time I started over was seven years ago, when I decided to end my marriage of 15 years. With it also went an adulthood of accumulated things. Furniture. Memories. Photo albums. Things I had inheirted, which were all lost in the blink of an eye like a housefire that has been burning for the last seven years. Today I am a man who doesn’t even own a couch. The majority of my furniture was given to me by friends who couldn’t stand seeing me living in a house with a card table to eat dinner on or sitting on the floor to watch TV. I’ve had good, kind people in my life who were willing to share their abundance when I was just beginning again.

I moved again after my job of nearly 20 years ended and the world was changing due to a pandemic. I’m starting over again, back where I started, back where I grew up. Some days I think of being the age I am now and feeling like I’ve got a 10-15 year late start. The work that I am trying to do is overwhelming sometimes. A dream better suited to a younger man.

I think sometimes of the things that I want, a vision of how I want my life to be, and that can be disheartening. Sometimes it feels like I’ve run out of time for anything like that. I check home listings on Zillow at places I would love to live and unlike the first time I bought a house, you can’t pick up a three bedroom with a finished basement for $165k anymore. Try $700k, depending on what you are looking for. I wonder how anyone does it. I worry that my life will have come and gone before I can buy a house. Or if I could, I’ll be in my late 70s before I can pay off a mortgage.

It’s unreal.

I drive a used Jeep Liberty with a lot of miles on it, but it is paid for. I live in my grandparents’ old house, which takes a lot of work. It’s a great place to have an office where I can write at least. My office is my favorite room in the house. In those ways, it gives me the solitude I need to get the work done and keeps a roof over my head. I’m not a social butterfly around town, so I don’t have a lot of distractions other than when my dog wants to play fetch. Or when my son is with me and wants to chat about Marvel superheroes and Star Wars and Vietnam and a hundred other things.

My family is closeby, which means I’m around if they need me. Sometimes I turn them down for offers to have dinner together because it feels good to be asked, but I have the luxury of declining the offer. I have other things to do. Just because I’m not punching a clock doesn’t mean I’m not working.

I guess when I look at the STUFF that I want. A dream house, a 4Runner, bi-yearly trips to Europe, a Sprinter van, winters someplace tropical, it stings a little because I’m starting off from the ground level again, and those are things only the seasoned professional can afford. Those are luxuries. Maybe a different version of me who took a different path has those things and I’m feeling the pull of it on some quantum level.

So I was reading the War of Art and came across this:

Restance and Being a Star

Grandiose fantasies are a symptom of Resistance. They’re the sign of an amateur. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.

Steven Pressfield, the War of Art

I’m not an heir to some family fortune. Nobody is chasing me with an advance check or a three book deal. I’m just a man who never shuts up about writing because it not only brings him peace of mind, on occasion it has given him joy. Feeling overwhelmed that my writing hasn’t allowed me to drop $700k on a house or a new Toyota is the sign of an amateur. Feeling frustrated that I don’t have thousands of followers is holding me back. I can either give in and take a job and go back to scribbling whenever I’m not so exhausted to stay awake, or I can use my time to throw myself into this endeavor. Sometimes losing myself in it and dragging my friends and readers down into it with me.

Maybe I’ll never be able to afford a big house or a nice car or trips or even a couch. But I’ll have the satisfaction of doing something that I love. I’ve had stuff before. Lots of stuff. And hardly any of it brought me any real joy. Right now, I can live a life without the pursuit of stuff and I can work towards manifesting my dreams.