{"id":407,"date":"2005-06-19T08:49:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-19T13:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lawrencem94.sg-host.com\/?p=407"},"modified":"2005-06-19T08:49:00","modified_gmt":"2005-06-19T13:49:00","slug":"the-bubble-blurred","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/?p=407","title":{"rendered":"The Bubble Blurred"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I still struggle with taking on other people&#8217;s &#8220;stuff&#8221;. I&#8217;m a fiercely loyal, loving person, and for those closest to me, I would do anything. Except rob a liquor store. Those don&#8217;t always go well, I hear. Anyway, it&#8217;s hard for me to not take on their problems, like they&#8217;re my own. I feel it, I have an internal struggle with being frustrated &#038; mad, and yet when the day is done, there&#8217;s not one damn thing I can do except continue being a supportive friend, and try to squash &#038; expel the extra emotion I&#8217;m carrying around, because it&#8217;s not gonna make a difference, one iota. I realize it&#8217;s all part of my own issues, wanting to be so connected to my parents, anyone, that I would immerse myself until my own (then frail) boundaries were bent, blurred and sometimes non-existent.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday my bubble rolled through &#038; intersected with two different friend&#8217;s lives, people who are both in relationships that could be better. Loads better. One of them probably shouldn&#8217;t even be with the other person, but that&#8217;s my judgement. I just wish I could give each of them some of my strength, enough to last beyond the time they&#8217;re with me. I&#8217;d give them whatever it takes to make them feel better &#038; do what they really need to do. I even said to JWo, &#8220;I wish I could just break off a chunk of my self esteem &#038; give it to (*).&#8221; I counseled, I hugged, I admonished, I straight-talked most of the day yesterday, between both people. And yet today is a new day, and both people are still with their partners, situations? Probably unchanged.  I got an email last night from one of them, the one I believed should end it, that they&#8217;d talked again &#038; made progress &#8211; and I just felt like I&#8217;d been kicked in the gut. In our conversations yesterday, we&#8217;d compared the relationship to someone being beaten, in a physically abusive relationship. They agreed, they were the one being beaten. And the other person refuses to change. But they&#8217;ve made progress? I don&#8217;t believe it. Because the leopard cannot change his spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin, and that person smelled their demise coming &#038; did a serious sales job to someone who wanted to buy it. As Yoda might say, &#8220;Helpless, I am.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>And now, I&#8217;m the one who said all this bad stuff yesterday, and was brutally honest about what I saw in their relationship. I don&#8217;t think it will be held against me, but it&#8217;s going to make it hard for me to look either of them straight in the eye. I&#8217;m not that good of a liar, and I&#8217;ve got duct tape on that side of my bubble after everything we went through yesterday. <\/p>\n<p>But it did make me really grateful for what I have with JWo. So much so, he was completley absolved from weed-whacking the perennials I planted last year &#038; he thought were weeds. It&#8217;s a messy bed &#038; he thought he was cleanin&#8217; up. I figure if they&#8217;re tough enough, they&#8217;ll come back next year. If not, it&#8217;s just plants. <\/p>\n<p>I wouldn&#8217;t want to share my bubble with anyone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I still struggle with taking on other people&#8217;s &#8220;stuff&#8221;. I&#8217;m a fiercely loyal, loving person, and for those closest to me, I would do anything. Except rob a liquor store. Those don&#8217;t always go well, I hear. Anyway, it&#8217;s hard for me to not take on their problems, like they&#8217;re my own. I feel it, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}