The Unfiltered · Monday · No. 14
Not going to pretend this happened this week. It didn’t. It’s been sitting in me for a bit now, and I still haven’t figured out how to put it down, so here it is.
I ended something a while back that I built for years, with someone I genuinely fucking cared about, and I still don’t have a clean way to tell it because there isn’t a villain in it. God, I wish there was a villain in it. Villains are easy. This is just two people and a situation that turned to shit slowly enough that neither of us saw the exact moment it became unfixable.
She was one of the best friends of my entire life. Not “good friend,” not the casual bullshit version of that word people hand out to everyone. Under my skin close. The kind where you picture five years from now and she’s just in the picture, automatically, because you literally cannot construct the future without her standing in it somewhere. We built a business together. Years of real work, side by side. That’s not nothing. That’s not something you throw away over a bad mood.
Then her relationship turned into something ugly — a trauma bond, and I mean that clinically, not as an insult — and I watched someone I loved get pulled under by it in real time, and there was fuck-all I could do to speed up her clock. You cannot want someone’s healing more than they want it. I learned that the hard way, over and over, like an idiot who kept expecting a different result.
I tried to help her. Obviously I tried. That’s what you do for someone who’s under your skin like that.
Nobody warns you what happens next. You don’t get thanked for trying. You get promoted — against your will — from friend to unpaid rescuer. Every call becomes triage. Every conversation is the same wound, reopened, described in the same words, and you’re standing there holding it because somewhere along the line that became the job, without you ever agreeing to take it.
I pulled back a little. Wrong. That was abandonment, apparently. I leaned back in, tried to actually help her look at it differently instead of just replaying it. Also wrong. There is no correct distance to stand from someone who has decided, even without meaning to, that being the victim is the only identity they’ve got left standing. Too close, you’re enabling it. Too far, you’re one more person who left her. There is no right answer. I looked for one for a long time like a fucking idiot, until the damage was too much to handle.
The business sat still for half a year. Just sat there, dead, because the woman I built it with had maybe two working hours a week left in her after everything else was done eating her alive, along with alcoholism. I don’t even blame her for that completely — I know what it’s like when your whole head is on fire and work has to wait. But a company doesn’t care whose fault it is. It doesn’t move either way.
And the friendship — the actual, real friendship, the one that used to be about a hundred different things, stupid jokes, dumb plans, nothing conversations about nothing — collapsed down to one single subject. Him. What a piece of shit he is. What he did to her this time. And I believed every word of it, he sounds like exactly the disaster she says he is, fuck that guy specifically and sincerely — but that was never the actual point. The point is a friendship isn’t supposed to be a container for one story on a loop, and I was the only one required to show up and hold it, every single time, on demand.
I have my own shit. I’m not saying that to compete with her pain, I’m saying it because it’s true: I’ve got migraines that do not leave, every day, some days worse, and a body that’s already spending half its fuel just staying upright and functional. I did not have some bottomless well of extra capacity sitting around for free, waiting to be somebody’s unlicensed, unpaid therapist for however many more years this was going to take. I found that out the hard way, somewhere around the six-hundred-and-something time hearing the same story, sitting there feeling something in me just quietly, finally give out.
So I left. Tried to sell my half of something I built for years, for less than it was worth, maybe tenth, because getting out clean mattered more right then than getting out even. She didn’t take it, so I took what was mine, closed the old project and started from scratch. And I told her straight — no clean speech, just the truth — that I couldn’t keep doing it. Not the business. Not the calls. Not the loop.
And here’s the part that actually wrecks me, more than any fight ever could have: there was no fight. We both know we still care about each other. We both know exactly why it still had to end anyway. That is so much worse than hating each other. Hate gives you somewhere to put all this. This just gives you grief, with nowhere to send it, for a person who’s still alive, who I’ll probably run into someday, who didn’t do one single unforgivable thing — she just needed more time than I had left in me to give without destroying myself in the process.
I am angry. I want to say that plainly, because I promised myself I’d say this straight tonight — I’m angry at the situation, at the ex who did this to her, at her, at the timing, at all of it, at how fucking unfair it is that caring about someone wasn’t enough to fix any of it. And underneath the anger I am genuinely, achingly sorry — sorry it ended like this, sorry I couldn’t be the bottomless trash can for her feelings she needed, sorry for both of us.
I actually think she’ll be fine, eventually. She’s smart — genuinely one of the sharpest people I’ve ever known — and she’s doing the work, in her own time, at her own pace, and I believe that completely. I want every good thing coming to her, no asterisk, no bitterness attached to the wish.
I just couldn’t be the one standing there for however many more years it was going to take her to get there. Not with what’s already sitting on my own plate. I’ve turned this over looking for the version where that makes me a bad person, and I can’t find it. It’s just two people who ran out of road at two different speeds.
Fuck this whole situation. I mean that completely, and I still hope she gets everything good that’s coming to her. I just don’t want to be in the car for the rest of that drive.
The Unfiltered runs every Monday — no lessons, no answers. Just what’s true.
