The trouble with me

So he wants to know, this former old friend of mine, whether I'm up for a "brief, potentially clumsy chat".

No, I am not.

The last time we spoke I was painfully aware that he was giving me some kind of last chance to prove myself. As a friend I had been placed on probationary status. Whatever it was he needed to hear for me to be redeemed I must have failed to deliver it. Somehow when we talk it always ends up with him saying, "you know what the trouble with you is?"

Yes, as a matter of fact I do.

The trouble with me is that I sometimes forget that I have a right not to like certain people. I go through life as if because of my many imperfections I have a responsibility to like people, to disregard their unkindnesses, to be the bigger person, the one who always forgives and gets along with everybody. I forget that I am not the only person with faults. I forget that I can choose which people I keep closest to me. I forget that I do not owe each and every person in my life my unswerving friendship and unconditional love.

The trouble with me is that, for years now, I have listened to each and every person who wanted to tell me what the trouble with me is and damn it, I've believed every single one. The trouble with me is that, if you tell me that I'm horrible, ugly, stupid and useless, I will walk away from this conversation believing you, and in every encounter I have I will wonder whether this is what everyone is secretly thinking.

The trouble with me is that I can hear your opinion about your favorite band, a Chinese restaurant or politics, and I can decide whether to agree with or dismiss it, but I cannot simply dismiss your opinion about me. I will trust any theory advanced about me, even by people peripheral at best to my life, even by people who need me to play the villain in the stories they tell themselves, before I will trust my own sense of who I am and what I stand for.

That is the trouble with me, old friend, and that is what I have decided to change: a transformation that begins, unlike most, with not returning a phone call.