Intervention Pending in Current Events

It’s not that I don’t lack empathy. I used to have the disease to please but after I did my own inner work I can see now that people really do just suck at life and health. They have weak characters and make bad choices. Not everybody failing is a victim. I see all of this within myself and that was the self-awareness I was hiding from. Now I have this in my consciousness that I am a co-creator and life isn’t just happening to me. I couldn’t be a victim forever, I had to become a survivor at some point.

Is it compassionate to enable shitty people to become parasitic to others? There has to be boundaries and balance. I give compassion to myself first and foremost. If I have to protect myself from, an addict, for example, then I will. It’s the simple choice but not the easiest choice to step away. We all have an ability to respond, a response ability. I cannot be response-able for everybody else. If someone doesn’t want to rise up and empower themselves then I have to let them go. They are parasitic. They will drain my time, my emotions, my mind, my finances or whatever else. They have to clean up their own karma and it doesn’t look like conventional compassion to just let them hit rock bottom so that they can learn their own hard lessons. But it is compassion, sometimes. That’s where I’ve learned all of my lessons, at rock bottom.

I say this spiel because of my roommates toxic codependency. It’s not egregious but it’s been a year of tic-tic-tic-tic and I’m ready to pop. I’m tossing and turning, stressing and pressing and I need it to stop.

I had one single interaction with her yesterday. This is after she asked to spend the day together and go to a provincial park. She hid in her room. She came out to make nachos. I noticed that she was day drinking. She usually waits until it is socially acceptable before her functional alcoholism kicks in. Her eyes were red and swollen. She was blasted from weed and/or crying all day. She is absolutely not taking the drama and upsets well in her life.

She has a friend that used to be a friend with benefits. She fell for him but he met somebody else and ended that part of their friendship so he could focus on his new relationship. She knew the score, I was the wrong person to talk to if she wanted me to fuel her victim narrative. Now she met his new girlfriend a year later. Last weekend. She said that she could handle it and be happy for him. That’s when she discovered that they are moving in together. Now Toni, my roommate, is devastated. This must mean that she was holding on to hope that he would leave his new girlfriend and come back to Toni. I don’t know what he sees in her. She’s so [ blank]. First of all, what was he supposed to see in Toni? To be Frank. She adds to nothing, she just takes. Some people like to feel needed, that’s who she will have to meet if she wants a match made in hell.

We are 36. Our lives shouldn’t be a Taylor Swift song. This woman needs more life experience.

I need to have one of those your drinking has affected me in the following ways moments. An intervention. It won’t go well because this is a woman who does not like self-awareness. Nobody does but she is an adult child. She has no control of her emotions, no control of her mind and no control of her behaviour. She is plagued with loneliness because she is waiting for someone to come and take care of her childhood needs. She needs to parent herself. It’s hard to witness her commit to all of the child things. From little things like spoiling her appetite before dinner. Wasting food because it’s too saucy or whatever else. Am I supposed to be her mother and force her to finish her dinner? There are the big things like her being incapable of soothing her own damn self. The first lesson we are to learn in life is to sooth ourselves when we aren’t being coddled. She self-medicates on top of actual medication. Clearly her mother never let her cry it out as a baby.

This woman has become so toxic inside and out that she now has an autoimmune disease that she is trying to hide from me and the world. Alopecia. I just cleaned a huge portion of her bathroom, hers has the bathtub and black ink was running off the faucet when I was trying to soak in the tub. She’s dying her scalp. I cleaned out her sink while I was at it because I cleaned out mine also. Her hair is everywhere. I had to help her unclog it a few months ago. I feel bad but she did this to herself. This doesn’t just happen on accident. She made dumb choices and now she won dumb prizes. Her liver is stressed but she keeps piling it on. Germ theory is a baseless superstitious pseudoscientific hoax that enable people to play the victim. There is only one cause of disease and the cure is the body but we have to make lifestyle changes to support healing. She wants easy street and just wants to take a magic pill that will make the symptom go away. The symptoms are the cure. I was conditioned to believe this also.

I don’t even know where to begin with my intervention talk.

Dear Toni:

When we talked about moving in together you sold yourself as a responsible adult. What I got was an angsty adolescent with functional alcoholism that is financially abusive. You went back and forth on what you would pay. Back and forth on what costs we would split. Back and forth on splitting costs in general. You had me supplying absolutely everything under the premise that you would cover half of it. You were all over the place telling me what to take out of what I send you for the rent.

Then during the only time that I ever opened up to you, which was about my grandmother being hospitalized because she started getting blood clots after receiving an experimental vaccine, you exploded on me about how I needed to get that vaccine so you knew I had job security because you were convinced that I wasn’t pulling my financial weight with rent. I had since shown you that I was just under $2000 in the hole and that you were the one who owed me. I waved it.

That was a red flag that I ignored. We are not dating, you are not entitled to tell me what medical decisions I need to make or what I require for work. I’m not your mother, I shouldn’t have to tell you how to treat people. The way you had been treating me before that blow up, before you made that evening all about you immediately after I opened up to you, was inappropriate. The passive aggressive stomping, slamming of things, the dirty looks, the sassy tones, the ignoring me when I spoke to you.

At that time I was walking on eggshells. I was dreading coming home in the evenings. I would open the door and it would be pitch black in the apartment. You would be passed out drunk on the couch in the sitting position with drool all over your face. You would or wouldn’t get up and stagger into your bathroom or bedroom, walking into walls along the way and then slam your door. I would invite you to visit with mutual friends and you would decline. You would commit to drinking alone until you passed out instead. I could see how much you were drinking every night because I had to clean up after you. I would wipe the wine off the counter, walls and floors. You were all over the place with our finances because we never discussed any of it while you were sober. This has been an ongoing issue. Now I see that you have self-harmed to the point where you incurred an autoimmune disease. This is hard to witness.

You have offloaded as many responsibilities as you could on to me. You leave your dishes and cleaning for me. You have me supplying everything while you contribute nothing. You literally ask me to buy things so that you can use it. Shovels for example and various tools. You leave it all up to me to track our groceries, to get them, to pay for them, and to put them away. You tried to have me carry that financial burden to the end of the month while also sending you rent biweekly. You only sent me money for groceries twice so I had to disobey and do it my way to protect myself from your financial abuse. We spent almost every evening when we moved in together talking about you and your issues that you never ever worked on. It was draining and toxic for me.

I had to start locking myself in my room to get away from the toxic environment. I have to save every single receipt to protect myself from any future financial abuse. I continue to clean up after you. From dishes to wine. I spent the first year doing all of the cooking. You offered to cover half of the cost of the patio furniture I bought and when the time came to discuss how that would work you committed to the childish thing and said “I don’t give a fuck” and left it all up to me to decide. Then the other day I had asked you nicely to take your laundry out of the dryer and you snapped at me. “Why didn’t you tell me!?” You committed to saying the childish dumb thing again, I was literally telling you. You have no control of your temper again. When you are not over drinking you are high 24/7. Lately your drinking has been ramping up again.

You asked if we can get a new place together and I am open to it but I cannot do it if you are going to continue being a functional alcoholic with the mentality of an entitled adolescent that needs me to parent you. This move would be easy for you because you didn’t expand into this place like I did. You never unpacked your stuff. You didn’t unpack your last apartment either. Our next place will just be the same. It will just be newer appliances that I have to maintain. More space to clean. You won’t unpack there either. It’s just another place where you will end up feeling lonely and need to self-medicate. You are not in control of yourself and I need you to be.

-end of intervention

This woman feels lonely, that is what plagues her. She has needs not being met, that’s why she feels that void. She doesn’t want to face the reality that nobody is coming. 7 billion of us on this plane of inertia (planet earth) and not one is coming. Nobody wants to, nobody has to, nobody owes it to her. Nobody is coming to make her do the things that she doesn’t feel like doing. Nobody is coming to tell her to clean up after herself. Nobody is coming to make her finish her dinner and stop spoiling her appetite. Nobody is coming to coddle her when she is sad. Nobody is coming to tell her to put that drink down and quit pot. Nobody is coming to tell her to put her phone down and go for a walk. Nobody is coming to help her control her restless mind. She has to parent herself. Being an adult means we have to do all of those things we do not feel like doing.

She is above everything. She is critical of everyone else and judges them. She doesn’t have life experience outside of a Taylor Swift album. The way she goes off about people at my work whenever I bring up work drama. “These people have nothing better to do with their lives and will just be there forever.” These people are feeding their families. These people can be single mothers who didn’t kill their unborn child to avoid living a life that’s not all about them, the way Toni did. These people do have better things to do with their lives. That’s why they work a dead end job. This woman doesn’t understand anything so she thinks everything is stupid. This is the lowest, the absolute lowest level of thinking. It’s hard to witness and harder to experience. Polarizing with a person who can’t think beyond themselves or their own tiny level of awareness is tedious.

Anyway, I vented. Maybe I will draft up a letter so I can read it to her. I have to have this conversation with her. It’s eating me alive. I do love this woman, she is my friend but I can’t be an enabler. I can’t enable her to suck at life and health. It’s not my responsibility to help her grow up. I’m not in charge of raising her. I will support her if she wants to change. If she wants to wallow and self-medicate I can’t be there for that.

Last updated August 07, 2022