🚨TW:Child abuse at school report🚨 I never get much traction on here but, if y’all can please retweet this or head to FB & share. I would really appreciate it. My son was assaulted by his teacher. It’s on camera & they won’t let us see the footage.
https://t.co/90jXk4Ksp5
My therapist told me:
“When a person grows up feeling unseen, they learn to love by over-giving. They pour into everyone else, hoping that, one day, someone will finally pour back into them. So they become the care taker. The fixer. The one who shows up, even when no one shows up for them.”
And the hardest part? Deep down, they're not trying to be strong. They're just waiting for someone to do for them what they've spent their whole life doing for everyone else.
I realize more and more that I do not dress up enough, I do not go out enough, and I do not take pictures enough! That’s going to be one of my biggest goals for next year.
There is this lie we all secretly believed :
if a friendship is real, it will always feel like it does right now.
You remember that version. Three hour calls about nothing. Replying in 0.3 seconds. Seeing a meme and sending it to five people because all of you were permanently online. You could tell who was upset by the way they typed “lol.” You knew their class schedule, their crush rotation, their favorite cereal. Friendship felt like constant contact.
Then somehow one day it does not.
Now your closest friend might reply two days later with “sorry just seeing this.” You stare at that sentence with a small sting, even though you wrote the same thing to somebody else last week. They cancel plans because they are exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. You reschedule and then you cancel. Whole months pass in voice notes and “we need to catch up soon” and screenshots of flights you might take someday.
It starts to feel like being quietly broken up with in slow motion.
Nobody warns you how much admin adulthood stacks on top of love. Rent, sick parents, work that bleeds past office hours, kids, therapy, bodies that suddenly need more maintenance, nervous systems that finally crack after ten years of pretending to be fine. Everyone is trying to be a decent partner, decent coworker, decent child, decent human in a world that feels like a rolling crisis. Of course the part of you that once had energy to send 17 updates a day is tired.
Less communication is not automatically less love.
But it is a different shape of love, and that is the part that hurts.
Because the scared part of you still keeps score like a 16 year old. They have not texted in a week. They viewed my story but did not answer my message. They were online. They posted. They made time for someone else. It does not matter how many bills you both have now. The kid inside still measures affection in frequency, not capacity.
Adult friendship asks you to grow a second lens. One that can hold “I miss how it was” and “they are not abandoning me, they are surviving.” One that understands that sometimes your friend did not text back because they spent all day trying not to cry in a bathroom at work. Sometimes they are not ignoring you, they are in the same fog you are.
Grace is not “let them treat me however.”
Grace is “I will not confuse silence with betrayal unless they show me it is.”
Check in, not out.
It sounds simple until your own pride gets involved.
There will be days you tell yourself “if they wanted to, they would have reached out” and use that as a reason to lock your phone. You call it a boundary. Often it is defense. It saves you from the vulnerability of being the one who sends “hey, how is your brain” after three months of nothing. It protects you from the possibility that they really have drifted. So you opt out quietly, tell yourself a story about how people change, and let something beautiful die out of sheer fear of going first.
What if checking in is not humiliation. What if it is maintenance.
Sometimes check in is not a deep talk. It is a dumb reel sent at 22:37 with “this is so you.” It is a voice note that says “I drove past our old place and wanted to throw up from nostalgia, how are you.” It is a “thinking of you, no need to respond.” You would be shocked how many people cry over those three words in grocery store aisles and parking lots.
And sometimes, yes, what you find when you check in is that the thread is gone. They give you one word answers. They do not ask anything back. They leave you on delivered until it becomes obscene. That is information. Grace does not mean pretending that is fine. It means you can let it hurt, let it be real, and still not turn it into a courtroom in your head. You can grieve without inventing a villain.
Adult friendship is two people saying, over and over, in a hundred tiny ways: I did not forget you. I am just carrying a lot. Thank you for still knocking.
Lest we not forget this is the same woman who stood on a stage with a microphone for a major event & said, “And Buffy you know, you’re infertile” I don’t know why anyone was surprised😭 Noone believes me when I say older black women are unhinged, I love em but they are UNHINGED!
Blurting out ‘is your thyroid enlarged?!?’ to a woman you JUST met (and in front of a group) is WILD to me 🤯💀
I don’t care if you’re a whole doctor — at least pull sis aside if you’re actually concerned!!
Sometimes I swear Jackie is just a low-key asshole lol 😭
#MarriedToMedicine 🩺 #Married2Med
The weird thing about reading so much as a child and gaining a huge vocabulary from that is I can't define a lot of the words I use, I just...know that they would fit correctly in a specific sentence? Does anyone else experience that?
Ngl one of the downsides of being an emotionally intelligent person is that you'll be able and willing to see and understand things from everyone else's POV... but people are rarely capable or willing to give that same grace of understanding towards you.
An eternal frustration.
I was today years old when I finally understood what happened here.
I always thought the baby ran into the bushes, Sabor followed it and killed it off screen. But it seems like she actually caught up to it, picked it (maybe instantly killing it) then ran off.
Brutal either way!