LOVE AND LIGHT

For 25 years, I considered someone my friend.

And then, at the end of that friendship, I learned how she had apparently come to see me.

Argumentative. Condescending. Unable to control my emotions. Someone who “plays the victim.” Someone who “pushes everyone good” out of her life.

She even reached into my marriage to make her point, bringing up an argument between my late husband and me that happened months before he died.

She wasn’t there.

She didn’t witness it. She didn’t live inside my marriage. She knew pieces of a complicated moment between two human beings who loved each other, and years later, after one of those people could no longer speak for himself, she used that moment as evidence of who she believed I was.

And then she told me I push good people out of my life.

That sentence has stayed with me.

Because who decides who the “good people” are?

Longevity doesn’t make someone good for you. History doesn’t make someone healthy for you. Being described by other people as “full of love and light” doesn’t mean every interaction they have is loving or illuminating.

Sometimes a person can be wonderful to many people and still be hurtful to you.

And sometimes ending a 25-year friendship isn’t “pushing someone good out of your life.”

Sometimes it is finally recognizing that someone who has reduced you to labels, weaponized painful pieces of your history, and decided they understand your character better than you do is no longer someone you feel safe calling a friend.

What strikes me most now is the contradiction.

“I have never judged you.”

Followed almost immediately by a judgment of my emotions, my personality, my relationships, my grief, my marriage, and my entire pattern of human connection.

That is judgment.

And I’m not sure where “playing the victim” even fits into this anymore.

Talking about something that hurt me doesn’t automatically make me a victim.

Walking away from someone who speaks to me this way doesn’t make me incapable of accountability.

And refusing to accept another person’s assessment of my character as objective truth doesn’t mean I can’t handle disagreement.

Maybe the biggest thing I’ve learned is that I don’t have to decide that someone is a bad person in order to decide they are no longer good for me.

There’s an enormous difference.

Twenty-five years earns a place in my history.

It does not earn access to my future.