Garbage Doesn't Always Take Itself Out

If there's one thing I've learned over the past four and a half years, it's that no one will guard your mental health more than you. You know your own mind, you know your triggers. You know what you can tolerate and you know what will set you off. You know you can't get into a car with out feeling claustrophobic, you know that a doctor's appointment causes anxiety to the point you're crying in the waiting room. You know that if someone doesn't care how you feel, it can hurt more than the health issue you're dealing with. 

I also know that protecting your mental health is hard. You're already going through a lot and you have to go through even more to keep what little positive mental health you have left. 

Sometimes you have to be the garbageman. And yeah, sometimes their job sucks shit.

Before the appointment at the Mayo Clinic in February of this year (2024) that changed my life, I had been friends with a co-worker for years. We met at work, got to talking, and like most relationships, naturally progressed to doing things outside of work. I have a group of workplace friends (I've been working at my job for 23 years), and she was a part of it. We both seemed to have pretty decent lives until COVID hit. I did the dryer sheet war and lost, and she had some family members who had health issues. We began that journey in 2020 supporting each other, but over time it seemed like her family problems eclipsed my health issues, and while she listened to me wonder if I would ever find a doctor who could help me, I listened to her while she coped with relationships and how her boyfriend treated her.  

I can admit this right now. Listening to her issues hurt me, but that wasn't her fault. In fact, I didn't even realize letting her lean on me was hurting me until she ghosted me in January. Out of the blue, she stopped talking to me. Didn't message me on our work website, didn't email me. Didn't wish me good luck, in any way, when I had my appointment. Didn't ask how it went when I came back. 

It hurt, it really did, and I felt betrayed. I had spent hundreds of hours talking to her, letting her vent, and she dropped me during one of the most important times in my life. I developed anxiety after dealing with my (undiagnosed) lichen sclerosis for so long, still have it to some extent, though not drinking anymore has helped immensely, and her ghosting me ate at me. 

I would log into work and wonder if she would reach out, but she never did, and as the months have passed, I realized she did me a huge favor. I don't have listen to her gripe about her boyfriend anymore. I don't have to listen to her talk about her own health troubles when mine has taken up so much bandwidth. I just had no idea how much listening to her hurt me, and as our friendship has faded into "someone I used to know" territory, my mental health has lightened up and I don't have her problems weighing me down.

If we would have stayed friends, I still would have supported her, probably not even aware how her own life was affecting mine, but I don't have to play therapist anymore, and honestly, it's really freeing. Even if she were to apologize now, I might accept it, but we'd never be friends the way we were. I don't want to be friends the way we were, and maybe, mental-health wise, I couldn't handle it anyway. I hear news about her from a mutual friend, and she's not doing any better than she was when she stopped talking to me. In fact, she might have even gotten worse. She desperately needs a real therapist, and I'm fortunate she stopped shoving me into that role. 

Sometimes we aren't so lucky, and we do have to haul the trash out. I had a friend I met back in 2016 in the #writingcommunity on Twitter. I did a lot for this woman, brainstormed story ideas, hosted her on my indie blog (vaniamargene.com), and gave her thousands of dollars of free editing. We were friends, at least, I thought we were. Then she published her book that wasn't ready and blamed me and another beta reader/editor because we helped for free. She said our free edits weren't worth anything and that's why her book had problems. I can't even remember when she published now, 2018 or so. You'd think that after such crappy treatment I would have said, "Bye!" But she didn't do the "fool me twice" for me to realize what kind of person she was, she had to fool me five or six times, the most recent last year when I hired her to beta read a rockstar trilogy I wrote and she backed out in the middle of book two, claiming she didn't connect with the characters.

I'm leaving out a whole bunch of incidents, and there's a lot because she doesn't know how to treat people, but she does what she likes and then blames that person for not accepting her apology. We all know apologies are only as good as the person's actions, and if they keep doing things they need to apologize for, the apology is meaningless. I finally learned that I needed to break ties with her, permanently. I couldn't let her keep disappointing me. I couldn't, essentially, let her keep lying to me. She's another that has a whole bunch of her own mental health issues, and dealing with hers made mine worse. She didn't see herself out the door, but after she backed out of helping me (after all the work I put into her career, such as it is), I decided I couldn't take it anymore and cut her out of my life. She ended up twisting that too, saying in a blog post she probably didn't think I read that I stopped talking to her because she didn't like my book. I tried on and off for eight years to be her friend, and while she kept insisting she'd changed, her treatment of me, and other people, never did. 

It wasn't so hard not to talk to her anymore. We were at the point where she didn't really want to be my friend anyway. She couldn't understand why I took her treatment of me so hard. It wasn't only just me, it was other friends, other writers in the community where we hung out. Backing out of things she said she would do, not delivering on promises, simply just being a shitty person. 

You don't need to keep shitty people in your life. If they hurt you, cut them loose. It might feel terrible, ripping that Band Aid off like that, but after the sting goes away and your wound can get some air, you'll realize that you did more for yourself than keeping them in your life ever could. 

If you're reading this, it's because you probably have a health issue that has fucked you up. I know dealing with my lichen has majorly screwed me over, and only now, after close to thirty doctor appointments, a hysterectomy, a colonoscopy, and now trying to get rid of hemorrhoids, I'm finally making some progress. It's very very slow progress, and each time I have to put up with something, car problems, work issues, dealing with tech issues on my author website, or one too many bills, I feel like I take a massive step back, mental-health wise. 

I don't miss her. I miss what our friendship could have been had she been a decent person, but thinking like that is useless. She'll never be decent because she doesn't think the way she behaves is wrong. 

I had to cut my fiancé loose, too, and that was really really hard. I'm not going to go into it now. That time of my life is hard for me to drudge up and I'll have to get myself in the mindset to write that post. Losing friends is hard, especially if you're not outgoing enough to replace them. You may start to get scared that you'll be all alone. Hopefully you do have relationships that offer some support. In all honesty, I don't have many people in my real life who understand or wants to try to understand what these past four years have been like for me. You may have people in your life who don't sympathize, can't empathize, and see your issues, physical and mental, as inconveniences to their own lives and what they expect out of you. A lot of people take their health for granted, and until that's taken away from them, they'll never truly understand how it feels to be you. I took my health for granted, but I would still be going through what I'm going through regardless if I hadn't bought those dryer sheets. When my gynecologist performed my hysterectomy, that I needed because I had painful fibroids, she said she found and removed some endometriosis. I'm beginning to suspect that she may have found it but didn't remove all of it. From what I know, that's nearly impossible anyway, so that's not her fault. So what I'm going through right now, the bloating, discomfort, that has nothing to do with what started this whole thing. It's just more crap I'm dealing with on top of what I've already dealt with. I don't blame anyone for not understanding. It's just life. But, that doesn't mean it gives people permission to treat you like garbage. 

Clean house. 

Ask yourself, does this person bring you joy? If the answer is no, you know what to do, no matter how hard it is.

Being a garbageman isn't the most glamorous job in the world, but I hear they make pretty good money and if we're talking emotional pennies, we could all use some of that.