the things we finally see
on ending a friendship, old wounds, and becoming conscious of the ways we learned to survive
last night was a bit of a rough one, i won’t lie. i spent four hours talking with someone whose friendship has been complicated for me for decades.
and before i even went, i knew i probably shouldn’t. there was a fluttering of fear in my chest.
because spending time alone with this particular friend had not felt easeful for years, and somewhere inside of me i knew that keeping the peace was going to cost me something.
my intuition knew it, but i went anyway because another part of me wanted to make the effort. we have many friends in common, a whole community really, and i wanted things to be peaceful.
and maybe i still believed that if we sat together and talked honestly enough, we could finally understand each other.
so we talked, and it started out fun and light.
it was all of the good parts that i have always wished were where we could stay with the friendship. but somehow we never could.
painful encounters always seemed to cloud the more lighthearted ones. and over the course of those four hours last night, i found myself doing something that was painfully familiar.
i was fawning, apologizing, and trying to explain myself over and over again to someone who could never really see me.
i tried to explain that i cared, that i had tried, that i didn’t mean to hurt anyone, let alone this person, and that i really did want to understand better.
i tried until my voice hurt, my mind felt unraveled, and my throat was constricted and tight.
and somewhere in that feeling was something much older than this friendship.
it was the same well-worn and familiar feeling of trying to be seen by the very people who were tasked with raising me and lifting me up, but who could not truly see me for who i was.
isn’t it ironic how we can be sitting in a room in 2026 while some part of us is still trying to solve something that happened decades ago?
it’s as if the past walks right into the room with us because our brains are constantly using what has happened before to try to predict what might happen next.
our nervous systems don’t only learn from obvious danger, they learn from rejection and abandonment, from relationships where we stopped trusting ourselves, and from all the moments when being ourselves didn’t feel safe.
and then we meet a person or enter a situation that touches one of those old places, and suddenly we aren’t responding only to what is happening now.
because really what we are doing is looping.
by the time i got home last night, i knew something i hadn’t been willing to let myself see before.
i was done with this friendship.
i pretty much knew it last year. and i had feared it for years. but this time i knew it in such a visceral way that there was no more denying it.
so at 2:30 in the morning, i sent a text wishing them well and asking that we agree to go our separate ways, with no hard feelings.
and this morning, i have to say that i didn’t wake up regretting the text.
i just felt relief.
you know you have made the right call when walking away brings more relief than staying. there is something there worth listening to.
and one other important distinction is that i also didn’t need to make them a terrible person.
i just didn’t want to participate anymore.
and that feels different for me, because i have spent much of my life trying to understand people, but unfortunately this became the very thing that kept me in relationships that hurt me.
i could see the wound beneath someone’s behavior and somehow turn that into a reason to keep allowing the behavior. i believe a lot of us do this.
maybe because it’s easier. or maybe it’s because we are afraid of change, or of confrontation, or both…
but i don’t do that anymore.
now, i can understand someone’s wounds without making myself responsible for them.
because ultimately, having compassion doesn’t mean everyone gets access to me.
it’s the old, everyone deserves to eat, but not everyone gets to eat at your table phrase i love to say.
ironically, i learned that one from another friend who i eventually had to walk away from.
as i have been thinking about all of this, i keep coming back to empathy, and what happens to our empathy when we are in survival.
because i know what happens to me. last night, i fawned and apologized and tried harder and harder to be understood. these are things i learned a long time ago, and apparently there are still places where they come right back.
but we don’t all protect ourselves in the same ways. some of us appease or disappear, while others get louder, need to be right, or try to control the conversation and convince the other person that their version of what happened is the only one that can be true.
and i wonder what happens in those moments to our ability to really see the person in front of us.
because it seems possible to know the language of empathy without always being able to stay connected to it.
we are incredible mimics as human beings.
we learn what to say, how caring people respond, and the expressions and words that signal empathy.
it’s the masking i am always writing about.
how is it that so many mask so well and so much of the time?
it’s a learned survival skill.
i just happen to suck at it.
but the question that really matters is:
what happens when another person’s experience doesn’t match ours?
can we still let it exist without feeling like it somehow threatens our own?
i think maybe that’s where it gets harder.
because if i need you to agree with me in order for me to feel safe, then your separate reality becomes threatening. your boundary can feel like rejection, and even your memory of something can become something i need to argue with because it doesn’t match mine.
and i don’t say this as if i have somehow figured it all out, because i haven’t.
last night showed me that pretty clearly. there i was, my almost 50-year-old self, with my throat tightening and my voice hurting, still trying to explain myself enough to finally be seen.
that little girl is still in there.
the difference is that now i can see her too.
and i am here for her in a way that i never could be before.
maybe this is part of what it means to become conscious. and being conscious is not becoming enlightened or healed beyond all triggering. it’s not somehow rising above our own wounds.
really…it’s more like having no more fucks to give.
it’s being willing to sit in the fire and the heat of the wound.
and let it…burn, baby, burn… all the false narratives and limiting beliefs right down to the ground.
all the things we had to become to survive.
and this is where writing comes in for me.
writing lets me take something that was swirling around inside of me and place it in front of myself, like a mirror.
i really do believe that every human being could write about their life and their inner journey, and if we all put it down on paper, or onto a screen, as the case may be, we would be given a window into each other’s souls.
there is something kind of amazing about that when you really think about it.
we have these fleeting, invisible thoughts that appear and disappear inside of us, and somewhere along the way human beings created symbols that allowed us to make them visible.
we created language so we could share our inner world with the outer world, so we could build bridges that link us together.
and eventually, with the printing press, a person could sit alone and enter the mind of someone they had never met.
i love how we can connect with someone who could even be long dead, and still we could walk through the halls of their inner wanderings and know something about where they had been.
it’s actually kinda a miracle that we learned how to make something as impermanent as thought last.
and now, in a strange way, ai is accelerating this again.
it can mirror us almost instantaneously and help organize thoughts that are going in ten different directions. sometimes i use it simply to get started or for spellcheck, and other times to help me find a structure, but i still want to work through the writing myself because i want the words, sentences, and creative choices to be my own.
there is something very sacred to me about wrestling with my own words.
keeping the writing human, while still using the tool.
what i really love about writing is that it takes us somewhere. it shows us something we maybe couldn’t quite see before.
sometimes i begin writing thinking i know what i am writing about and discover halfway through that i don’t.
last night i ended a friendship,
tonight i am writing about what it means to become a more conscious human.
and hopefully, somewhere in all of this, i am becoming more capable of standing up for myself while still standing for the things i believe are good and true.
because i don’t want healing to harden me.
i want to be here, fully human, and writing about the journey.
being this living vessel of consciousness, with a heart that longs to connect and a mind that has somehow learned to survive this crazy world…
and still create beauty through it all.
i’m a writer, speaker, and musician exploring trauma, neuroscience, and spirituality. i write about what it means to remember who we are beneath our survival.
if this resonated with you, i’d love for you to join me here and share your thoughts.