Motley Musing 2: Am I the drama?
Have you ever considered that maybe, just maybe you are the problem?
This is an incredibly difficult thing to admit but sometimes, it is worth considering.
Before I get into this post, Happy New Year! I understand we are almost at the end of January, but as a Nigerian, and more specifically, a Yoruba girl, I am obligated to offer salutations as many times as humanly possible, taking into cognisance the prevailing situation. And so, as I have not been here this year, a new year’s greeting is most appropriate.
I must also publicly admit that I am grossly inconsistent. In my last post, I planned to have at least one post a month, but alas, life happened. Life always happens. I am now learning to navigate better. I have so many unfinished posts in my repository that may never see the light of day — sorry to those posts. I do hope that I am able to be a lot more consistent this year, get into a good routine and put up more things here. I thoroughly enjoy writing. I have a whole lot to say, and you have a whole lot to read. Cheers to an awesome year with a lot of posts, I hope.
To my musing of the day!
I recently cultivated what I will describe as a beautiful, liberating, and intimate friendship and I have been so nervous that I would ruin it. Why? That’s an excellent question. Allow me to unravel the many layers of this onion situation. I nurse an irrational fear of losing my friends. I realised that this beautiful journey, only a few months old, was having many more moments of instability and rancour — our friendship honeymoon was over! Maybe I am dramatic, and it is not as serious as I make it sound but, that is certainly how it felt. I love my friends very deeply and loss is not something that I am able to grapple easily with. This fear makes navigating conflict or sudden differences quite difficult. I have realized that I am terrible at handling conflict in my relationships. I hate confrontation, and in fight or flight, my default setting is flight. This is me being the drama.
There is a common saying in my culture — twenty friends cannot be friends for twenty years. Although this may be true a lot of times because people outgrow others, and life happens, I think that it is worth considering the few times that this is not the case.
In my twenty and some years on earth, more specifically, my time navigating adult relationships, I have seen that you cannot always fly. Sometimes, you must fight because you sure do not want to lose some relationships. But communication can be hard! It is one thing to clearly articulate how you feel, it is another thing for the other party to understand your perspective. It is also another thing to understand why the next person feels the way that they feel. We are inherently selfish, making long-term relationships significantly more tasking to achieve. I have learned that we also do not always extend grace to the people that we love when they hurt us because we do not expect that they will hurt us. It is a lot easier to be graceful to a total stranger and give them the benefit of the doubt. Learning to extend this grace to those we love requires very deliberate efforts.
Honestly, the only flight that I want to be on is the flight to my next holiday. No, really. I am determined to be a lot more deliberate with my relationships. Learning to be more gracious; to listen to understand and not respond; to have healthy boundaries and respect the boundaries created; cultivate healthy habits all together; and to be the drama, less.
My hot take is that we all need therapy or at least a medium (pun intended) to talk about how or why we react to things the way that we do.
Finally, I implore you, in big 2022, not to be the drama in your relationships — communicate clearly and effectively. Remember that it is okay to walk away when the hurt outweighs the happiness.