Ego strength, and more on being exhausting...

I think of the people I know that I think are exhausting, and what, if anything, that means in relation to how I might be being perceived. There are parallels, but there are differences. Namely that anyone who has ever called me "exhausting" never really goes away.

Of the people I've considered truly exhausting, who are two women I was close to, I walked away from those friendships and absolutely did not look back. When we meet in social situations, we treat one another as if we'd never been close, with a compulsory civility.

Both of these women glommed onto me and wanted to spend tons of time with me. One didn't like driving home after drinking, so she'd sleep in my bed. Both were intense, emotional, but emotionally stunted women. One of them was in a long term relationship with a good friend of mine, and the joke with them was that it wasn't a date until she was crying about something.

Both of them wrote me handwritten, multi-paged letters, which they sent through the mail, after a perceived infraction. Typically, this was me calling them out on a negative behavior that made their social interactions difficult for them. One was so thin-skinned, aka the one with the aforementioned relationship and its constant crying, conversations had to be kid-glovved at all times. It was tedious, and exhausting, and few of us around her dealt with it well, when it was understood that the conversation had to be steered toward what was going to not upset her. The other was a profoundly weird girl that no one ever understood, but that could also be part of her charm. Sometimes, it just happened that something one of us did offended her. Very, very deeply. I'd dealt with her, on two occasions, having a devaluation episode with someone I considered closer to me than she was to me, so she put me in a position where she expected me to side with her, and not them. In both instances, her thought process was so starkly black and white, there was no way to reason with her. These people, both male friends of mine, were "evil."

Both, despite their flaws, were a lot of fun to be around, when they wanted to be having fun. They were incredibly smart, witty, funny women.

In any case, at some point, the hand-written letters arrived. The close friendships with these women happened a couple of years apart, 2006 and 2008. The former continued to write me letters, which I stopped reading, and then she finally sent me an absolutely horrible, scathing email in 2007 which I received just minutes after finding out one of the most wonderful, kind-hearted women I've known had died of a heroin overdose. Those two things made for some bad sleep the next two weeks... When I see her now, we don't act like we were ever close, but because she is a very funny person and we have that rapport with one another, we have let bygones be just that.

The latter's letter, in 2008, was meant to be a farewell, and to her credit, it was. I have seen her socially a couple of times, but other than not meaningfully ignoring one another, we haven't conversed at all.

So. Pairing these experiences with something my therapist said last week, I'm going to make a leap here. My therapist mentioned the phrase "ego strength" when we were discussing how I am polarizing, and at around the three month mark, if someone has gotten close to me, it either passes by with no issues, or I "lose" the person for a while. Rarely forever, but that has happened too. Both of these women "broke it off" with me after about three months (though I had known them for several years prior to our spending a lot of time together, and we'd only been casual friends 'til that point). Usually, after about four to six months, the person who has "left" comes back in some way. Through tentative contact, or, sometimes we just completely resume the previous relationship, romantic or friendship. Typically, the relationship is solid the second time around and suffers none of the issues of the first go-round. I would hazard a guess that in the interim, both parties reflect and accept things about one another that they, at first, had trouble coping with.

It makes sense, putting the phrase "ego strength" into the equation that this is what happens. The people whom with there is no three-month bump are people who are quite aware of who they are as people, and, though they are certainly works in progress as I am, they are not daunted by someone with a strong personality challenging them, and often they wholly embrace it (as I do when I am met with the same). The ones who do balk and have a great deal of difficulty with me are generally in some state of flux, who are trying to help themselves and maybe don't know how or can't yet see that they do need to help themselves and feel as if they are not on steady ground in general. In short, my presence in their lives is unstable feeling and it threatens them.

I don't know how to change this, but it feels good to recognize it. I certainly don't want to continue this pattern, and wish to be a calming force to people who have not yet found their ego strength, but that will be something I have to continue parsing out.