Standards

I hate it when people turn away from me because they claim that they “can’t live up to my standards.”

I have standards for me.

I don’t have standards for you.

That’s your job. And not my problem.

I had a friend, Stacey, who I used to talk to for hours. We bonded. She was having a rough time with this dickhead she was screwing. And she was a single mother to a teenage son who was starting to get into trouble. I tried to not push my ideas and ideals on to her. I just wanted to be supportive, to be there for her when she needed to talk. No pressure, no expectations.

Eventually I opened up and told her my secrets, too. I didn’t tell the intimate details of my life to anyone back then but I told her.

And one day she just stopped coming by. Stopped calling. Stopped answering my calls.

I think things got really tough for her. She got into some shit that she knew I wouldn’t approve of. But, so what? Just because I wouldn’t do something doesn’t mean that I would look down on her for doing it. It didn’t mean that I would care about her less.

We all carve our own paths. We have different thoughts, different experiences, we are different people. We get into different situations and we handle them in different ways.

Perhaps I’m still bitter. Perhaps I never really ended it with Stacey. I always wondered what I said wrong, what I did, what made her dump me. Perhaps I need closure.

Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this.

She made me feel used. Unimportant. Irrelevant.

She hurt me by not respecting me enough to understand that I cared about her, not about the things she did.

But the thing is, I don’t think she respected herself.

And maybe that’s why she couldn’t handle respect from me.