I don’t write any of these things because I want to hurt you. I write these things because until I can look at them and get some distance from them swarming in my brain I hurt myself. I do it in a myriad of ways. I do it by literally physically hurting myself. I do it by berating myself constantly for how pathetic and stupid I am for feeling upset when nobody intended to hurt me.

It isn’t that people betray me constantly. It is that I have a serious problem with letting my expectations get out of line and I don’t know how to keep my expectations in check without writing out how much I wanted versus how much I got.

I think a few people betrayed me: my mother, my sister, my brothers, my father. But my friends? Sarah didn’t owe me the devotion I wanted. Dad doesn’t owe me support. Friends who are trying to the best of their ability to support me in being a better mother don’t owe me anything more than they have going spare on a given day; they are not required to give at a certain level/rate.

I don’t say that I need to assume people are lying because I think people are being malicious or hurtful. I think it is absolutely board-standard for people to over rate how much support they are going to be able to provide because they want to provide more support than they can. I do this too. I want to be a major source of support to dozens of people…. and I can’t. People are not bad because they over promise.

But I act like a serious asshole when I develop expectations around the promises people make. I spent literal years asking Sarah not to promise me anything unless she could actually deliver on her promise. It didn’t impact how much she promised. She escalated the intensity of her promises because she wanted to be able to love me the way I wanted to be loved. But she can’t. She doesn’t have that kind of time/energy going spare. That’s not a betrayal. But it does hurt me because I am painfully fucking literal and when you tell me that you are going to talk to me every week and you cancel 3/4 chats because you are tired… I hurt. When you tell me that you are going to take my kids because you want to have weekends with them and that happens like 1/5 times you schedule… I hurt.

I can hurt even if you aren’t doing anything wrong. If people are that bad at estimating what they actually have to give then they can hurt me without ever betraying me. I need to learn how to live in a world where people are always going to be like Sarah. That doesn’t mean I can handle the degree of it that I get from Sarah…. because I hurt myself to keep promises and she is trying to get healthier and stop hurting herself to give to people. It’s a broken dynamic. That doesn’t mean she is betraying me or that she is evil.

But when I can’t process my hurt anymore because her feelings about being humiliated are more important than me dealing with the fact that I need to be changing what I want from her and she doesn’t want me to use the only venue I have for coping with my disappointment…

That’s a problem.

I will love this woman until my dying day. That doesn’t mean I can keep falling into a pattern where I give until I hurt and she only gives what she comfortably can. Not because she is doing something wrong…. because I am entirely failing to have appropriate boundaries. Because I am failing.

I can have better boundaries with other people.

I’m telling you. Fat hoarders are my kryptonite. I love them and want them and I try to enmesh with them so hard… it’s a problem. I have a type. It isn’t ever their fault that I do what I do. But I have to change myself so I stop feeling so dependent on their attention.

Every single minute I spend being upset that a friend can’t give me what I want is a minute I can’t spend noticing how off the fucking charts awesome my current life is. I have 4 people who love me so much they can barely give me a moment of peace or an inch of space around my body.

Last night my son slept on the floor next to my side of the bed because he wanted to go to sleep holding my hand. My baby girl had to check every hour on the hour all night long that I was still RIGHT THERE. At exactly six this morning my big girl came in and joined us on the bed because she wanted snuggles and love.

I felt absolutely flooded with love and joy and peace. I haven’t felt this much goodness in my body for a while. I have been overwhelmed by being upset and feeling not good enough.

This is why I purge these feelings here. So I can get them out and get back to feeling good things.

It does work; it does help. But I have to not care about your feelings more than mine.

That’s hard. I do care about you more than I care about me. But I don’t care about you more than I care about my children. So here we are. I’ve been writing about feeling hurt for a bit here. Because I need to if I am going to get this bile out of my brain so I can focus on just how lovely it is to have my children.