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Yeah, I added a country song to the playlist. Not my usual run of music, but with one of my jobs being Waffle House, I have to listen to a lot of it. And this one, "Find Out Who Your Friends Are" by Tracy Lawrence, struck me.
"Everybody wants to slap your back/wants to shake your hand/when you're up on top of that mountain
But let one of those rocks give way then you slide back down look up/and see who's around then
This ain't where the road comes to an end/This ain't where the bandwagon stops
This is just one of those times when/A lot of folks jump off"
Maybe it's just a matter of how a person was raised, though I think it more a matter of standards and honor, but this is why I, honestly, refer to many more people as 'acquaintances' than I do as 'friends'. There's also the term some people like to use, 'fair weather friends'. This is a misnomer. Friendship is, or at least should be, a shared gift. If they're only around for the good times, they're not a friend. I don't expect people to go to quite the lengths I do (let's be honest, I know that I have some codepency issues, and quite possibly some martyr/savior complex). But I'd hate to think that I am in a minority of one for feeling contempt for those who walk around from a true friend when they're low.
I have some who will likely learn my views on this harshly. People who, when I was at my lowest, criticized me for it, turned their backs on me, and then had the unmitigated gall to tell me they'd love to see me again when I'm better. I was even so low that my first thoughts turned to ways to get better faster, to have them back. It makes me appreciate even more the ones who constructively criticised, and prodded me, and stuck it out. Because I have no doubt that the ones who left will see me again, smiling and having a great time, and will actually come to me smiling and asking how I'm doing. And my smile will disappear as I tell them I'm doing wonderfully, but since they walked away when I was low, then they should do us both a favor and just keep fucking walking.
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Ehhh...It goes the other way around too, they just don't tend to write country western songs about "foul-weather friends." I always had one or two people I was really, really close to, and they were the only ones I thought of as friends. The rest of them were...not acquaintances, because I knew them fairly well, but just....people I knew.
ReplyDeleteAnd then, over the past several years, as I've hit a series of bumps and hitches as I traveled along, a lot of folk would reach out a hand or a smile or a shoulder, or make it clear that they thought I was important in there lives...and I was confronted by the fact that there were a lot of people that would be hurt if they'd known I didn't consider them as a friend. It's been a very warming few years, even though their "friend" meant different things to them than my "friend."
I still don't give my whole trust or EXPECT people to be there for me except for the the trusted very very few...but most people will be there if they can as much as they and happen to think to do.
Not that there aren't parasites, and by all means weed them out...
But I just wanted to share the other side. :)