My friend. She is always, always happy — like, I mean all the time. It’s annoying. Like really fucking annoying.
She’s so happy — I feel like I can never be sad around her, ever. It’s like she has no idea what sadness is or at least, doesn’t talk about it with me. Ever.
If I’m her friend, wouldn’t she want to share those feelings with me?
I feel less than every time I get off the phone with her — she’s always doing something “grandiose”. Her weekend plans are over the top, eccentric, wild. I always think I have a pretty good weekend, I mean, it’s nothing crazy, but it’s pretty solid. And then I listen to her. Suddenly, I’ve just had the worst of all the weekends.
As I’m in the middle of saying this to another friend of mine, I realize something.
I’ve been here before, too.
Bypassing.
For me, bypassing meant coping. It was my way to not feel anything. It was a way to numb, completely cancel out the hard emotions and replace them for good ones.
I look back — I was so overly positive, like, annoyingly positive. Like no one is that positive, positive. I was the worst kind of person — I was completely fake.
I see it now — I had conditioned my mind to see the positive because I thought it would help. The truth was, I didn’t feel at all.
I realize now that this old version of me still comes around from time to time — and she is showing up in my friend, now. It’s different, but really, it’s the same.
Fakeness and bypassing are still fakeness and bypassing.
Having this awareness now, I feel sorry for my friend. Not in an “I pity you” kind of way, but in an “I see you” kind of way. Like an, “I’ve been there and it sucks” kind of way.
Bypassing is a tricky because you think you’re saving yourself, but you’re not. you’re actually doing more harm than good. You’re trying to see the good, great. But it doesn’t work. It never works.
Life is pain, and sadness, and anger and joy and bliss — all at the same time. Bypassing is making the choice to only feel the “good” ones.
So what I would have to say to both my younger self and my friend is this —
That you will learn. That, right now, you might need that hope and positivity. You might be so desperate that you physically and mentally can’t focus on anything but that positivity.
But you will learn— bypassing isn’t the answer. It won’t get rid of your negative emotions but instead, it will numb you from them.
There is hope, though—because one day you will feel. You will feel so hard it will be so good and so bad, all at the same time.
You will experience bliss, like actual bliss. Not the fake, horse shit bliss you were feeding yourself before. It will be true, real, authentic bliss.
You will also feel like complete shit. Like someone smacked you across the face with a brick wall shit. True, real, authentic shit.
And finally, you will feel grace. You will feel so much grace for getting to experience this human life on this planet in this lifetime at this very moment.
So all I have to say is thank you, my friend, for reintroducing me to myself.
