Sometimes you have to be blunt with your friends to get the message across.
I refer to GFE here which means, according to Urban Dictionary, Girl Friend Experience from a prostitute. (No, I won’t deconstruct the pathological silliness in that – go ask a man who pays for it.) This was an email I sent to someone who is smart, sometimes very thoughtful, sometimes a jerk, and often messed up. This is a good read for anyone with a dysfunctional in their life. Call him narcissist or jerk. Friend or lover or relative – not all dysfunctionals are bad but they do need a reality check because they can’t do it for themselves.
B –
If you want to write to me keep the communication short and on point. Regrets and debts are to be excluded. That you are alive and I am the reason is nothing I apologize for. How you chose to live the unexpected gift of time was and is in your hands. It is with all due respect I tell you that you are a moron in how you have conducted your life and the choices you made. None of us are without some moronic behaviors and actions. Yours however are magnified by a never ending victim mentality. You might consider leaving that baggage behind.
As to obstacles in your life, indeed, they are there as they are in every one of the billions alive in all the multiverses with their infinite and ever expanding variations of obstacle possibilities and probabilities. However, since every possibility is existing and being made, some of those obstacles are being used as stepping stones. It may be of small comfort to you but during the worst of my divorce – Jim and his hundred thousand dollar divorce against my 5K – with his lies, fraud, theft of my monies, I found a way to climb out and thrive. With a teenager in tow. It became the ultimate GFE: I got paid for the book I wrote about what he did to me. As you know he now has a sense of humor about it. Good for him.
Stop the rambling verbal abuse used against me which is your stock in trade for unpleasant interpersonal interactions. It is not my intent to undermine your defense mechanisms but I will inform you they too have become moronic, transparent, dull and over-used. As you said in a moment of insight in a letter you wrote to me: “I submarine all my relationships. Crazy, isn’t it?”
Only if you know you do it and do it again and again and again. I wouldn’t call it crazy though. I do however call it abuse to the person you are doing it to since you are doing it intentionally and the only possible outcome to that can be pain to the person you have targeted. You of course remain in the moron zone apparently bound by some loyalty to it.
The kindness and empathy you have shown me and my friends and family is a strong part of your personality. Your wildly dysfunctional mother trumped its growth but you over ride the default many times. If your core was bad I would not be your friend. Ditch the moronic behavior (you know how), curse your mother and others, and put one foot in front of the other and go ahead and thrive.
Here’s to you. Leave the moron outfit. There will always be a jerk to wear it. Your time with it is over if you want it to be.
If you do, somewhere, there’s a GFE IRL 4U.