New Year's Resolution

OK, I'm getting started early.

Actually I got started about six months ago. I'm slowly weeding out the stressors in my life. The emotional vampires, the people who call themselves "friends" - who have never given a damn about me or my problems, who always dump their loads on me, and then who walk away or are nowhere to be found or who change the subject whenever I try to share my problems. One pisses me off the worst - if I get diagnosed with a disease, she's got it too, or if I am sick, she's dying. Her daily problems are always mega-tragedies , but if I utter a peep about my problems, she dissolves away like a bad Hallmark TV movie fadeout. To put it politely, too, the way that you can tell she is lying is - her lips are moving. She tells one story to me, another to my best friend, another to still another mutual friend - and none of the stories she tells is the truth. Friend? That's not a friend - that's a selfish user, a spoiled brat, an emotional vampire. Kickin' her to the curb.

Another "friend" whom I have helped over and over again is gone now too - because in a typical selfish fit, he was downright nasty and insulting on the phone. I've lost count of the times he called me over the years threatening suicide and expecting me to talk him out of it. He blames it on the liquor. Whiny and pathetic when sober, stupid and loud when drunk, he is perhaps one of the best representations of someone useless taking up peoples' air. He'll never change - because he can always find people to help him. Not me, and not any more. Next time he can kill himself (not that he ever will. No guts). I invented a manual for suicides once. Think I'll send him a copy. Oxygen is in short supply. Kickin' him to the curb.

There's other ones, too - the ones I've known for years who think nothing of calling or emailing for urgent help, insisting that they can't do it themselves - and when the work is done, no calls, nothing, and certainly no interest or concern about what I had to drop or change, or what emotions I had to put on hold to change gears to do something for them. They don't ask because they don't want to know. When they insist "You don't tell me anything!" - it's because when I start to, they either change the subject or get that foggy look in their eyes that says 'not listening not listening'... Kickin' them to the curb.

It must be my face, that seems so open, or my eyes, that look like they care, or appear sad or interested. Guess what? They aren't, and I don't. Never really have. Instead I listen to see what they are going to demand from me next, and start planning my days on how I can accommodate them and their little problems without disrupting my life.

This week I was told by several people that I looked better and healthier than usual. Well, I am. I'm not happier - that isn't happening with the deep and painful load I personally bear, every day, without even bothering trying to tell anyone about any more. These bastards won't listen, don't want to know, don't care if they do know, and have made that very plain. But I am slowly picking off these sand burrs that have been riding me for so long, itching and scratching and burning my soul with their constant and annoying little pricks. I am going to dump them all, one by one, until there are none left. I don't need them - and they can always find someone else to need. They think that I don't know why they do it - it's because they know that I am smarter, better than they are - and the only way they can feel equal to me is to 'fool' me into letting them use me.

And that's my New Year's resolution. I resolve to scrape off these selfish, whiny, hapless, helpless, schmoozing, simpering little pricks. Let them find someone else to sink their burrs into, let them find someone else to torment and torture with their pathetic needs and wants, let them stand on their own or rot in hell. Let them try laughing or sneering behind my back, thinking they've pulled still another one over on me. Now that they have developed their mewling, grasping, sickening dependence, let them stand or fall on their own. I don't really give a shit; not about them, nor their little problems, nor their simple-minded grasping petty needs.

I have a very few friends with whom I can share everything, and everyone else is just a non-entity, a nothing, a nobody, stuck on me for the ride. Well, the ride is over.