It came as banter in a group chat.
“I wouldn’t jump in front of a train for you”
When I read it it felt factual, stoic, cold, too cold.
I felt, in those double grey ticks, everyone’s judgement and pity.
This week’s been… Exhausting.
Work’s been difficult. Love’s been difficult. I feel like a shit employee. The flavour of the month is “unlovable”.
I go to work late. When my boss manages me, I get frustrated easily and defensively. When I go home, I fear my boss firing me because I am not a good employee.
The Courage to Be Happy means that I have to give up what isn’t working… To reach the next stage of happiness.
I laid on the couch, grimacing at my phone. I wanted to cry at the injustice of having someone not want to die for me.
Fucker! I’d die for you, I thought. What’s this imbalance? What’s this humiliation?
What does that then make me? A die-r for someone who was a wouldn’t-die-r for me?
Did this version of you in my head, one that was incredibly tight with me, metaphorically die?
Didn’t I tell you yesterday that I was despondent and extremely lonely? How’s a message like “I wouldn’t die for you” gonna fit into that narrative? Am I just a little less safe at the MRT from now on?
What if I told you all this? Would it guilt you into being more likely to die for me? Should I take out insurance for the both of us? What if I died in front of you? Would that make you regret not dying for me? Would a train slow to a nonlethal speed after hitting my body?
Was it ever about dying for me? Because nobody else occupies that spot other than your brother and mother. You wouldn’t die for anybody else, right? You promise?
Do I then, likewise, move you down the ladder of importance? As an act of revenge?
Or as an act of realising that I am putting you on too high a pedestal, and maybe, just maybe, we could love each others’ companies without having to consider jumping onto MRT tracks?
It’s time to reassess the rungs of the ladder. What would someone at rung 2 look like? Or is everyone either in rung 1 or 10? What happened to my boundaries?
Are you at the top only because I’m afraid that your joy and support will be gone once I focus on other things?
But you already are focusing on your own life too, while I’m making my entire one about you…
Am I afraid that once I lower you to non-dying-for levels, or more reason levels, you would plummet to rung 10 because I am so bad at drawing boundaries?
Later on you’d say in the chat, as a reply to another message I’d wrote, “where did you go? how come I don’t know”
And I would see pieces of myself, and pieces of the website about “enmeshment” and “co-dependency”, and I would have bubbling thoughts in my hopeful little brain about how I could somehow use your fear of being abandoned by me to make you assuage my own fear of being abandoned by you-
“I wouldn’t die for you. ” it rang true and true.
The ouroburos spins. Life goes on. You live, you die, but not for me.
Jesus fucking Christ, my friends. I am 27 years old. This stupid friendship and abandonment shit is what adults fear too?
Maturity is a lie, everyone just doesn’t admit they’re afraid.
Fuck, time to pay my taxes. Literally. I have no idea how to ask for my pay slip.
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