Category: Words To Live By

I think the biggest challenge in my life these days is keeping my heart open, especially when much of the world around me seems to not be doing so and instead chooses to lash out more than not from their hardened hearts.

I have spent decades working on opening a heart that got trampled upon and abandoned by one person after another for the majority of my life. I could write an entire novel on this, where each tragedy added layer upon layer surrounding my heart, making it become almost impenetrable at times. I’m thankful though this isn’t the case for me anymore because of all the work I’ve done around this. But active addicts who aren’t in 12 Step recovery usually have hearts that are almost entirely closed, something that tends to leave them in varying states of anger and rage.

One of the main goals of recovering addicts is to drop all the layers surrounding the heart that get piled on as the disease gets worse, and that often is a very scary thing to do. Much of the reason why an addict picks up alcohol and drugs or some other addiction in the first place is to numb themselves from the pains that life has served them. I can attest, as I spent decades perfecting the art of remaining numb by closing my heart off with one addiction after another, making my heart become a very heavy mass indeed.

Over the past decade, I have successfully been able to shed one layer after another surrounding my heart, thanks to my 12 Step recovery and my spiritual work on myself. But there are times I honestly struggle with it, especially when hatred, spitefulness, resentment, and the like is thrown my way, things I find hard to deflect and not feel when it happens. On a recent trip back to my fraternity, I felt that very thing from an active brother I didn’t know well at all, and it caused me to immediately shut down. I began to go to anger, as I sought to place a layer back around my heart not wanting to feel the pain of someone else’s hatred of me, one I know I didn’t deserve. While I knew it wasn’t about me, it was still hard to deal with. I’m thankful though that I was able to work through that anger quite quickly and find forgiveness due to the help of another brother I was there to connect with further. They assisted me that night to get me back into my heart, and into my tears, something that was able to lead to forgiveness, leaving my heart open.

While I know that having an open heart leads me often to feelings things that hurt, so much so that I shed a lot of tears, I believe it’s much better to remain this way. What I’ve come to learn on my 12 Step journey is that addicts who choose to live with hard and heavy hearts, always end up descending further and further into addiction, adding layer upon layer around their heart, leaving them in a vicious cycle of addiction that never goes anywhere but down. It may be the biggest challenge of my life these days to keep my heart open, but in the long run, I see in doing so the rewards far outweigh the costs, especially when I continue to remain clean and sober day in and day out, year after year.

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

I spent several years getting to know an individual I eventually came to consider a pretty close friend who consistently told me throughout how they were always able to see the end of their friendships. I always found the statement alarming and never quite understood how they could see such a thing, that was until I experienced it first-hand myself, when I came to believe it’s something they probably have done before in prior connections and made a repeating self-fulfilling prophecy.

Friendships, like any relationship, take work on both parts. Sometimes even a lot of work. But not everyone wants to work on keeping a friendship going, especially when the newness of it has long worn off and all those quirks from both individuals seem to become more of a challenge to accept. I believe this became the case of this friendship, at least in respect of how they felt towards my quirks. While I’ll admit I definitely bring my own challenges to any friendship I make, I constantly do my best to grow, change, adapt, and adjust to each connection and joke it comes easily because I’m a Gemini. This friend however was far more set in their ways, and became even more so after the newness of it wore off. And once the pandemic came and went, they became even more reserved, and dare I say extremely resistant to change.

For the longest time, I think we both did our best to both adapt to the differences each other brought to the table in our friendship, but eventually, it began to feel like I was the only one trying to make it work. When they started to not be as motivated to drive the 30 miles to where I live on the weeks we alternated visiting each other, when they stopped being open to taking day trips somewhere more than 30 minutes away, when they stopped enjoying going into Starbucks with me, a place our friendship began in, when they lost interest in going to the movies, something we once did with regularity, it ultimately began to feel like they were only interested in doing what they wanted to do and I had to just be ok with that. But, the last time I drove out to their home to hang out for dinner they made and a movie I brought, they feel asleep for the entire running time and barely said anything to me while I was there.

Trying to talk to anyone set in their ways rarely goes anywhere, as was the case with this friend. It became very frustrating to me, wanting to explore more in the friendship and them becoming less and less interested in doing anything but quick dinners and sitting around watching tv. When I asked them if they still enjoyed hanging out with me, their answer was sometimes. Their answer stung, as this very individual once told me how much they considered me to be their best friend. But best friendships take an immense amount of work to keep going and my best friend Cedric would attest to this, as we’ve successfully navigated plenty of troubled waters for 25 years now to still be the closest of friends.

This friend though didn’t seem interested in doing that type of work to keep it going so I thought that maybe they just needed some time apart from hanging out. They agreed that would help and said they’d get back to me in a few weeks to set up our next hangout time. It’s been months since I’ve heard from them. In light of that, I accept now this friendship is over, but I also accept that it wasn’t because of my doing. It was because of the very principle I’ve come to learn in how friendships sustain the test of time and that’s how much work an individual is willing to do on themselves to keep connecting with someone who’s different than them.

When one individual in a friendship stops working on it and becomes more set in their ways, it makes for a very lop-sided feeling, one where the interests of the other often don’t feel as important. All that leads to in the end is being able to see the end of that friendship because for one set in their ways, it becomes very easy to predict the end of a friendship when they are the one causing it to happen.

They say friendships come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime, and I’m blessed for the bunch of seasons I had with this individual and all the spiritual lessons I learned along the way spending time with them. I still love them immensely and always will. I just hope one day they may realize the only reason why our friendship ended is not because I stopped trying to make it work, it’s because they did, which in the end, made their self-fulling prophecy come true…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

Have you ever had a friend who seems to make fun of you all the time or much of the time you spend together, regardless of whether it’s just you and them, or the both of you with others present? If so, have you ever confronted them and asked why they pick on you so much? If you have asked that very question, was their answer ever something along the lines of, “I only pick on you because I like you?”

Let me be very clear in saying this.

Being picked on, no matter what the reason, is nothing more than a form of bullying, especially when the person getting picked on isn’t laughing.

I can attest to a lifetime of being picked on that often felt like nothing more than just being bullied. People have told me time and time and time again they only pick on me because they like me and yet when they’re doing it, getting a good laugh off of my expense and I’m not laughing, why do they keep doing it?

Maybe it has to do with this quote I read the other day from a man named Benjamin Walker who once said, “I always felt that if someone picks on you it’s because they’re not happy doing what they’re doing…” and I tend to agree. It actually makes a tremendous amount of sense that the only reason why anyone picks on another is because they aren’t happy with some part of themselves and so they deflect from that and instead pick on another, tearing an individual down, rather than building them up, temporarily feeling better about themselves in the process. People like this also tend to deflect even further from looking at themselves and the parts they aren’t happy with when they’re answer to a friend asking them to stop picking on them is, “You need to develop a thicker skin…”

I don’t need friends who act like this. What I need are friends who lift me up, who point out my assets, rather than make fun of my flaws or imperfections. I once had a friend who used to constantly point out that I had a bald spot growing on the back on my head and would laugh incessantly each time they mentioned it to me. It was never funny to me and even when I told them to stop saying things like that, they kept doing it. Not once did I ever make fun of their biggest struggle though, which was their weight. Rather, I accepted that part of them unconditionally.

People who continue to make fun of some part of you that you might be struggling with, even when they see you aren’t laughing about it, are nothing more than an insecure bully who isn’t happy with some part of themselves, even if they say they are happy with every part of themselves. How can you tell? Because they typically can’t take getting picked on themselves and get angry about it when they do. A more important lesson here though that I’ve come to learn is that someone who truly loves and accepts themselves unconditionally usually does the same with others and doesn’t enjoy having fun at their expense. But if they don’t love and accept themselves unconditionally, they often will pick on or pick apart those closest to them and find enjoyment in having fun at their friend’s expense. While I do have a few close friends that can pick on me at times, as I can with them as well, it’s only because it’s with aspects of ourselves that we’ve come to love and accept unconditionally and even share in common. Generally, we both laugh about those things profusely, rather than only one laughing at the other’s expense.

I’m thankful for those friends, friends who know me well enough to know when it’s ok to pick on some part of me and when it’s not. But friends who say, “I only pick on you because I like you…” and respond with, “You need to develop a thicker skin…” when I ask them to stop, aren’t friends I need or want in life. They are nothing more to me than a bully picking on another they deem as weaker than them, all to deflect from actually looking at the parts of themselves they aren’t ready to face or see, parts they still struggle unconditionally loving and accepting, instead lashing out at another’s expense…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson