One of the biggest complaints I had with my therapist and my current relationships is the fact that I always felt like I was the only one who was ever putting in the effort. I was the planner, the organizer, the host, the person who made the drive, the person who remembered the date, the names, the events, all the things. My curiosity and attention to detail usually get the better of me in most of my relationships.

During that call, I noticed I was bringing up things I’d definitely told them before but was getting no response. They weren’t being rude… just a little blank. Meanwhile, as they shared the events of their week, I was engaged, remembering the names, the background, the lore. Because I had actually been engaged for months and could easily tell you more about them than they could tell you about me.

One disclaimer before I continue. I don’t intend for this to be a bitch fest. No one wronged me, and this isn’t a story about a bad friend. If it starts to sound like one, that’s on me, and I’ve written it badly. This is a story about me and something I’ve done for most of my life, but never taken the time to look at head-on.

Unpacking the layers of my childhood in therapy, I realized that many of the things I do as an adult were shaped during those younger years. They were born out of parts of myself that I created to protect me, nurture me, and help me succeed when I didn’t have anyone else to turn to.

One of those actions was being attentive. Remembering what someone said was often paramount to my sense of safety. I also quickly learned that people loved to feel seen or heard, and that would, in turn, affect how they treated me. Whether it was remembering how someone liked their coffee or that washing the dishes and setting them up to dry in a specific way made the difference between getting whipped and just being left alone.

The older I got, the more I learned how to use these skills to manipulate people into getting what I want. And you might think saying that is kinda shit, but in reality it was getting them to buy me a meal, give me a place to crash for the night, or even drive me to work when I was really struggling. It became a survival skill.

If listening, being attentive, and caring about people feels like a job, then the underlying fear I have is that the job is the reason I’m here at all.

And I mean, fuck that. All of those years warped my idea of love being something you have to earn by being the most attentive person in the room, and that if you stopped, you’d quickly find out how much of the relationship wasn’t about you at all. Which is a hell of a thing to build a friendship on, but also probably incredibly common.

In my August post about The 5 of Pentacles and the Lit Window, I wrote that Lindsay Gibson says that if this was part of your childhood, you learned early that you had to give more than you got, or you’d be of no value to anyone. But what I think a lot of folks don’t talk about is what that morphs into in your later adult years.

I might be letting you down here, but I’m not about to write about how I’m pruning those people out of my life. In this situation, I think that advice is mostly bad. And on the internet, the advice is even worse; many people assume that ordinary human unevenness is a boundary violation. I disagree.

There are real moments when people are taking far too much of your energy to fill their own existential void, and those people do need to go. However, there are some very well-meaning people out there who just aren’t good at being an attentive friend. So I think there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with these situations.

My current plan is to stop being the one who reaches out first. That’s it—the entire intervention.

I’ll still invite them to things occasionally because I genuinely enjoy their company. I’m not disconnecting or having a big, dramatic conversation about it, and I’m not sending anyone a text that begins with “Hey, are we okay?” I’m just not going to be the one to carry the entire Rolodex of their life and be the consistent initiator. And I’ll see where that takes things. If it’s meant to be, it’ll still happen. If it isn’t, and I was only ever there to prop up their ego, then it’ll slowly fade away.

Back in August, the advice I gave was very similar regarding the post on pruning. Do I ever follow my own advice? This remains to be seen.

I want to share a story that Nedra Glover Tawwab shares that I couldn’t fit on my carousel slides. In her book Set Boundaries, Find Peace, the friendship chapter opens with a guy named Kevin, whose best friend, Dave, calls twice a week for 30 minutes to bitch about everything. Kevin loves him and takes a deep breath every time the phone rings. He never really confronts Dave. He doesn’t leave, and he doesn’t assert his needs. He makes a few efforts to steer the conversation toward himself, but they don’t work. So he decides to answer the phone only once a week and limit the conversation to about 15 minutes. He’s just turning the dial down and still keeping the person he loves.

Reading the story makes a lot of sense, right? Putting it into practice is like using a muscle that I’ve never used before. It feels awkward and like something is ending, even when nothing is.

And if you read reversals, The Empress card could also be showing a story that doesn’t involve leaving someone, but rather focuses on giving yourself some love and realizing that you deserve the same care and attention you give to everyone else. Which, again, is easier said than done.

I have no idea what the outcome of this will be. Maybe, in six months, they’ll have quietly faded away from my life. Or maybe our friendship will have found a new and more honest shape that we both like better. I don’t think I’m supposed to know yet, and I’m okay with that.

And as for the grief, I’m not sure how much of it is me grieving the person and how much is grieving something I made up about the person and our friendship. I’ll dive more into this in the post coming out Thursday.

Monday’s carousel had a two-question audit you could do pretty quickly when coming out of a conversation and feeling that weird emptiness in the pit of your stomach. But here’s what I actually did, which takes a little longer.

Rather than performing the two-question audit, I didn’t initiate anything for a full week. With anyone. I wanted to see who reached out, who sent a text, who forwarded a meme. And then I took a long, hard look at those relationships because they were the ones I wanted to start with. The folks who think about me enough to connect. Then I asked myself how uneven they might be and adjusted where necessary.

For the ones I didn’t hear from, they didn’t become villains, but they did make me think about where they sit within my circle of relationships. Another practice my therapist had me do, which I highly recommend if you often find yourself relating to anything I’ve said in today’s newsletter.

I say, whatever you’re feeling, it’s always worth looking at. If not reaching out makes you feel like the relationship is petering out, then some part of you already understood that the reaching out was the only thing holding it up.

Thanks for reading; this one was slightly uncomfortable to write, which usually means it was worth putting the fingers to the keyboard.

xo,
Chad

Below are a few books I’m leaning into for this month’s posts.

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