I'm actually on the swing back towards needing to take more active role in helping the people I make friends with overcome their problems (which is always what being a fixer-upper friend has been about to me -- they're making themselves miserable so obviously I need to help them change to stop that, because that worked for me) because... turns out relying on the emotional maturity of someone else leads to people lying about their maturity, limitations and boundaries in an attempt to seem "mature enough" for me? But I also do have a history of bad friendships where I tried too much to "shape" the other person and realised after the fact that I was doing that. Again. So I shut down that part of myself really hard and here we are.
I had a minor realisation about this, in that I tend to seek out people who talk about being unlikeable or annoying or "hard to make friends with" for whatever reason, because that's something that resonates with me. Kind of a "I will prove to you that you are loveable so I can prove to myself unloveable people like myself aren't", and believe it or not, I've had good results with it, because turns out most people... aren't unloveable, they're just defensive and if you're patient, they will show you their true selves, who are usually delightful people.
And I feel like I've been a good friend to a lot of these people, but a lot of them haven't really... returned the favour, I guess. Because I am also one of those people who is incredibly defensive, and while I can be patient and understanding, I just don't feel like people return that. Out of all the friendships, everyone who's agreed on the premise that I'm hard to be friends with (i.e. not been a hypocrite, which is something I demand from people) has eventually done something that our relationship didn't recover from.
And that's where the speech thing comes back in because I can't help feeling like I caused that by being upfront about being high-demand and creating an expectation that my needs are unreasonable.
Or maybe I'm just chasing my tail. At this point I'm just unpacking my various fucked-up friendships, and trying to understand how people who like me that much will turn on a dime to drop me or curse me out for not being exactly the way they wanted me to be.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 17/6/19 17:50 (UTC)I had a minor realisation about this, in that I tend to seek out people who talk about being unlikeable or annoying or "hard to make friends with" for whatever reason, because that's something that resonates with me. Kind of a "I will prove to you that you are loveable so I can prove to myself unloveable people like myself aren't", and believe it or not, I've had good results with it, because turns out most people... aren't unloveable, they're just defensive and if you're patient, they will show you their true selves, who are usually delightful people.
And I feel like I've been a good friend to a lot of these people, but a lot of them haven't really... returned the favour, I guess. Because I am also one of those people who is incredibly defensive, and while I can be patient and understanding, I just don't feel like people return that. Out of all the friendships, everyone who's agreed on the premise that I'm hard to be friends with (i.e. not been a hypocrite, which is something I demand from people) has eventually done something that our relationship didn't recover from.
And that's where the speech thing comes back in because I can't help feeling like I caused that by being upfront about being high-demand and creating an expectation that my needs are unreasonable.
Or maybe I'm just chasing my tail. At this point I'm just unpacking my various fucked-up friendships, and trying to understand how people who like me that much will turn on a dime to drop me or curse me out for not being exactly the way they wanted me to be.