Unfriend

Losing A Friend

I know I won’t be able to do anything until I get this out, so here I go. I’ve been so busy trying to oust toxic people from my life that I never stopped to realize what if I was the toxic one that needed ousted from someone’s life? I lost a friend last night. He unfriended me on Facebook. We got into an argument, he set a boundary, I crossed it. He gave me plenty of warning. He set the boundary the correct way. Looking back, to be friends, one of us would have to change who we would have been our entire lives or one of us would have to change who we were becoming, and neither of those things was going to happen. It’s still sad, and I can’t get it off my mind.

I’ve lost many people before. They chose through their own belief systems to disregard my reality, and I tried to respect them for that. The people I lost so far came down to opposing religious beliefs, death, or just drifting apart. This one felt different. I will try not to get into the specifics, because I don’t care who was “right” and who was “wrong.” A friendship ended, and I am grieving. I still believe strongly in what I did was right, but I will not use this post to demean the other person!

Unfriending my family on Facebook was a long time coming, and I doubt they read my blog anyways. I sent them a slew of letters explaining myself growing up and my relationship to each of them, and except for one brother, I got one text back from my sister basically saying “agree to disagree” about the whole going to hell thing, but she doesn’t see it as a problem. One brother out of three siblings actually believes I won’t go to hell because he no longer believes in Christianity. But basically me cutting off communication with them took years. My losing my friend took one conversation. That’s how sudden this was. I guess you could say we had different philosophies and views on society. I won’t go into more detail than that. But I’m angry beneath the sadness.

They need to make a movie about the average Joe in working class America. There are many variables to the average Joe, but one thing that’s growing is that he falls into one of two categories: he either works at least one full-time job to provide for his family and still relies on food pantries and other government assistance to make up the difference, or the growing population makes more than the poverty guideline that hasn’t been changed in decades (is based on a percentage of income that rises, oh, 3% each year to make up the “cost of living difference” when we know inflation is more than that) but still doesn’t make enough to actually live on. Basically, more and more people work and still don’t make enough to pay rent, buy groceries, and afford necessities.

But all the news cares about is poverty=crime, because that’s what makes the news. They don’t care about the working poor. They don’t care about social services dwindling and the hoops you have to jump through in order to even get into social services jobs. Want to be a therapist? Depending on the state, you have to have a Master’s in Psychology or Social Work, supervised hours, which, good luck finding a cheap supervisor who has time to do supervised hours on top of their already loaded case load, and then take tests to get your licensure, which you have to keep up every year by going to continuing education classes which, yep, cost money which are usually in big cities that you have to make time for. They don’t make it easy to help people. And more and more people need help.