the other side of being dumped

I've been dumped quite a few times. In my younger years, it was pretty much me getting tossed aside because of shit I couldn't really help. For example, I date a girl who thinks I'm not ghetto enough for her St. Matthews lifestyle. Hmmm. But as the years passed, and I was dumped again and again, the reasons became more serious--personality conflicts, marriage or bust, long distance, things that aren't as shallow and that are true hurdles to a successful relationship. One thing I never used and had used against me was age, maturity, being at two different places on the road of life. Until 4 AM.

Of course, I haven't been in a relationship in a long while, but I would say that ending a friendship with a best friend is very similar, regardless of gender. I don't have but maybe three truly best friends and I've had my battles with each of them before, some more so than others. But I've never lost a best friend in battle unless it was the battle of time, where you grow apart from friends just because you both become different people than you were when the friendship began. That has happened numerous times with people, and there's not much one can do about it. However, I've never really directly said, "hey, I don't want to be your friend anymore." I've never really been able to do that because I think I give my friends more chances to work things out than the norm. I feel like I have been given several chances to make up for wrongs in my life, and I try to be open and do the same...however (and this is partly from what I learned about life in Ireland) I don't think waiting for people to come around and be who you want them to be is the way to go about it. And knowing Lindsey, the friend whom I've had to "dump," she's not going to be able to sit back and accept necessary change for the sake of friendship, not in the way I changed when Emily sat me down last May and told me I needed to make some changes.

This was something I knew that was going to happen probably a lot longer ago, back when we were roommates. There was a conversation that should have been a red flag back then, one about her choosing her man over her friends, and it really didn't sit with me well. I can understand picking your loved one over a friend in certain situations, but we were talking about when the loved one is in the wrong and that apparently didn't matter to Linz. Huh. Oh well. Things never got any better, really, because she began to change for the worst and really became a self-centered person that I was slowly hating day by day. I couldn't wait to move out of the apartment and free myself of the dark cloud that constantly over my head when she was around. It happened in October, and I thought it would help things, the space. But in fact, it has not. Each time I saw her over the last six months, it reminded me of this person she had become and even after she left the boring cocksucker of a boyfriend, it didn't matter--she wasn't changing back to the person I called my daughter.

What was I supposed to do? Last night, I pretty much put the nail in the coffin and it was like a breakup. It was the worst night out I've had in a long, long time, only because of the way I had initiate this breakup. It was cold and callous, and I wanted to be much more civilized about it--sit down and discuss matters. But Lindsey's a very hard person to discuss matters with without her getting defensive and fidgety. And even with that being said, I just basically told her to fuck off at her birthday party, which isn't the best way to go about it. I don't know, I just didn't like her attitude, and I haven't liked it for months. I was getting tired of it and I'm tired of waiting around patiently and allowing people to just do whatever they want to do while trampling me in the process. Fuck that, I broke free. And I'm sad to have done it but I'm also elated. It had to happen; otherwise, I would have been a friend who would have slowly grown to hate her. And who needs that? She doesn't need it, I don't need it...but could there have been another way to go about all of this? Perhaps, I just don't know how. I've never dumped a best friend.

In the end, I'd much rather say, "hey, let's take a break and work this out later." But does that ever work? I don't take breaks. It's either let's work this out or let's toss this thing aside with no worries. I took the latter approach and boy, does it suck. It feels no better to dump than to be dumped, that's for sure. There are no winners; yet we move on.