Noticing

In this piece I’ll be sharing my experiences about friendships and relationships with people.

The last few years, I have learnt a lot about myself and others and am still learning more and more about it each day.

It’s known by many influential philosophers that people walk in and out of our lives at certain times to teach us lessons about ourselves.

This statement above had me so confused for many years, because I’ve seen, felt and experienced so much heart ache in friendships and relationships and I wondered why on earth it kept on happening, what the hell was it teaching me?

Now lets be real, it was teaching me lessons I needed to learn to be a better friend and a better human.

I have had the courage to look back on many past friendships with people and wondered how things went wrong.

I was never the type of girl that had one huge friendship group, I always had different friends from different places. Though I always admired people who were in friendship groups & how they managed their relationships and worked through things.

In some stages of my life, I was a part of many friendship groups but none that lasted the test of time.

The ones I did experience, I felt and witnessed not all those who were friends were there for the right reasons, by my standards and how I valued them anyway.

I always felt conflicted.

There have been times in friendships that I have been the friend I thought they wanted, but then when I expressed my authentic and true self, I was rejected and completely dropped. Most of the time without any explanation.

And in all honesty this one hurt the most.

Because I thought “I accept you for who you are, why can you not accept me. What did I do wrong?”

I’ve done this on several occasions, where I have thought I was doing the right thing by them, but in turn end up walking away with a target on my back.

Some friendship failures, I know I have contributed to and in the past I have lowered my thought patterns to seek validation from others.

My thought process in those times were thinking that, “they might like me if they think I “think” like this” and usually they are based on negative gossip.

And when I have done this, the friendships have failed and never really reached any depth. It was fake.

I used to wonder why I yearned so much to be validated by people that didn’t care much for me and were constantly consumed by others and what they thought of each other.

But in truth, I wasn’t validating myself.

I was seeking validation outside of myself instead of offering my true self to people that actually cared.

I was setting low standards for myself, I wasn’t giving myself the respect I deserved and I know universally this happens to many people.

We all have these thoughts of wanting to be accepted and as the saying goes “we accept the love we think we deserve. ”

I have been told that I’m too “sensitive”, that I’m “just too much for some people” and that ” I read into things” too much.

Receiving comments like that just made me realise, they were actually validating my experience.

It gave me insight on how I was perceived by that particular person or group.

In all honesty, with my life experience and what I know about people so far.

I learnt very well how to read between the lines of body language and someone’s emotional thoughts.

Which is what we all project out into the world, whether we like it or not.

Now, I’m no magician and I do not practice or indulge in witchcraft but I’m a very empathetic human being, I feel what someone’s feeling without them telling me. Negative or positive. It can be both a blessing and somewhat exhaustingly draining.

But it does help me deconstruct my perception on someone’s personality and what they project out into the world. In essence, it’s usually a really good bullshit detector.

It took me a long time to realise I just needed to accept myself and that those who were meant to be in my life would show up.

And living by this rule, I have cultivated beautiful friendships with very like minded people.

I stopped looking for friendships in places that I thought were good for me and started listening to my intuition and opened my heart to the right people.

I spent a lot of time alone with my thoughts through meditation, writing, ridding myself of toxic relationships & debriefing (venting) with my authentic and amazing friends that came into my life.

By doing this, my life started to make a trail of its own, instead of being concerned about what others think of me, I started to be concerned about what I thought of me and watering my own grass and planting my own seeds and my life started to blossom.

Don’t get me wrong, I still face some of these challenges in life today.

After all, we as human beings will forever be making these perceptions about others and ourselves throughout our life.

But learning to understand that you are the centre of it and that you are the one in control of how you deal with these challenges, is how you will overcome them.

Just remember that we are all connected and everyone we know and meet are serving a purpose. Good or bad.

It’s to help you learn, grow and blossom.

Lots of love

Fe