I recently wrote a blog that inadvertently hurt somebody’s feelings. Or better said, I referred to something that made this person feel bad about themselves.  It happened a while ago and I am just now considering it all–my blogging, that reaction and the ups and downs of writing my life.

The sad thing about a life is that at some point, someone gets offended–at least it happens that way in my life.  And almost always afterwards I learn something very important that makes my life more evolved and better understood to myself. I have never intentionally, at least not since I passed my college entrance exam, ever made someone purposely angry– but I have done it nonetheless.

Take the time a friend was sick and wanted me to come over to check in.  She must have said or done something to send me the drift that I should stop by, but I didn’t pick up on it and I didn’t come by.  The next time I saw her she was pretty angry with me and I apologized–I even brought flowers.  But I learned something very important about myself and about her and it’s been critical to me in my relationship with her ever since.  I learned that I need to never give the impression that I understand subliminal messages. I need people to tell me what they need up front and not expect that I’ll “just know.”  I used to “just know”, in fact I think I was some kind of a pro, knowing just what someone else was feeling and attempting to help them through it–before they even knew what the problem was themselves.

In the past, the folks in my life became dependent on my “knowing just what they needed” and I exhausted myself showing up for everyone in need.  But those days are over and I say good riddance to them. And thanks to this friend and our conflict, I learned absolutely that I no more want to be a person who automatically takes on other’s burdens.  In the past my choice to do so was my choice alone:  I needed to stop myself from doing that. And I finally did it.

My friend got over it.  She now knows me a little better now, too—knows what I can and can’t be.  And so do I.  This pal–incidentally a better pal now than ever before–inadvertently helped me learn this very important lesson about myself.  And I am forever grateful to her for that.

That’s what usually happens with me:  through trauma and drama come enlightenment and evolution.  It’s a hard price to pay but I pay it none-the-less.

I’m not referring to blame here.  I’m not saying “and so-and-so learned never to cross me again.”  Blame has nothing to do with this.  It’s about me learning, growing, evolving–understanding my life and my self and how it all works—the ups, the downs, the highs and the lows.  I never blame anybody.  I learn from them.

So for me, it is never about the moment of pain that any one, least of all anyone in my life including me–should stay stuck in.  It’s about the learning and the growth. And if you are someone who may have inadvertently hurt me–like I did my friend–I hope you move on.  I hope you don’t blame yourself, or blame me, or blame blame for what happened.  Everyone is doing their best in this lifetime.  That I know for certain.

We can’t change other people, as I always tell my kids–we can only change our reaction to them.  It’s harder when that person turns out to be us.  But we have to learn to forgive ourselves–after all, who’s purposely manipulating and plotting and planning to wreak havoc on another?  Unless it’s a bad soap opera or an episode of “Desperate Housewives” who in the world is trying to mess up?

Life is short–and take it from someone who knows all too well just what that saying really means.  We all deserve a break.  We are all doing our best.  And our best IS good enough.  If it isn’t, we’re in the wrong company.

As the anonymous saying goes, “Forgiveness is to set a prisoner free and realize the prisoner is yourself.”

I say it’s time to set ourselves free.

I have had a lot of response to my essay Triangles, where I describe my hope that my kids will always remember that in life, the only best friend they will ever truly have is themselves.

I have been particularly honored by the mothers who’ve responded, “I am marching my son/daughter to the mirror in our home to pass on this lesson”–what a tribute for me. I am honored beyond words. The lesson, in case you missed it, is point your finger at your child’s reflection and introduce them to their one and only lifelong best friend.

But this new essay isn’t about that lesson as much as it is about that mirror. Because that’s not the only lesson doled out in my water closet, among the blobs of toothpaste, mold on the wall, towels on the floor and unwashed sinks. There’s the Apology one, too.

Any time I catch my children calling themselves dumb, stupid, idiot, how-could-you-be-such-a-jerk, or anything else resembling a personal put-down–
I march them right to the mirror, have them look at their own reflection and APOLOGIZE. To themselves.

I assume on first blush that sounds a little weird. But honestly, I can’t tell you how often I myself have been in that place–called myself stupid and believed it. I grew up hearing adults call themselves dumb and somewhere deep inside of me I adopted the same routine. I continued the put-down pattern as easily as breathing air–so well in fact that as I grew older, if I made an error I verbally called myself “STUPID”–and just by saying it, I made that ‘bad’ feeling about myself bigger. Like I need one more person–and my BFF of all people–to put me down when I’m already down.

If I were to ever read the Rules Of A Lifetime–were someone ever to write it–I am sure it would place ‘Call Yourself Bad Names’ directly under the Chapter titled “Don’t Ever Do This.” Because let’s face it: enough people have, had and will call me bad names before I’m through in this world. Not everybody gets along. And even though I remind my kids when they say so-and-so-said I was such-and-such, “just because someone says it doesn’t make it true. It just makes it what they said.”– still, when my best friend tells me I’m dumb, stupid, an idiot, etcetera, somewhere deep inside me I kind of believe it.

So once I figured out who my real best friend was, I all but cured her of that call-me-bad-names habit immediately. In fact one of the last times I looked myself in the mirror and apologized, I was forgiving myself for believing the person who told me I gave myself metastatic breast cancer.

In case you didn’t know, there are many people out there who believe we, the ‘diseased’, give ourselves our illness in order to work out some other issue in our lives. This is not the same thing as finding ’silver linings’ in a disease. Slowing down, finding your own voice, not taking crap from others–that’s all great.  I’m talking about “and I will die so that I can finally understand why I let bad men into my life.”  Sorry, but the trade-off on that or any other tit-for-my-life’s tat makes ZERO sense when it’s your life on the line.  Of course not a one of these people who expound this disease theory actually has a life-threatening illness to begin with–therefore the theory is safe for them.  As for me I’ve never heard, for example, an MS patient say “Yes, I gave myself MS so I could understand my bad relationship with my mother”.  And you know I bet I never will.

Still, it’s a belief out there–a reckless, scary one in my opinion–that we choose disease, that we give ourselves, in my case, metastatic breast cancer. And so, when someone told me this a year ago, right after my re-diagnosis, and I was in a terrible, horrible, fearful place in my heart and my life–I believed her.  And immediately not only was I the victim of a life-stealing, insidious, out-of-the-blue killer, I was the killer as well. The mere thought of it all sent me over the edge.  It took months of therapy to get me back on track again.

Some BFF I turned out to be.

So it took me a long, long time to apologize to myself for that– ” MURDERER! ” is a tad more difficult to get past than “STUPID.”  But I did it.  And I still have to do it–because on the up and down roller coaster of the cancer life, there are days when even my biggest smile can’t erase the fear inside me that maybe this is all my fault…

Oh Lord, I did it again.  Looks like I’ve got a date with my reflection.

So, the next time you look yourself in that water closet mirror, make sure you tell yourself not only aren’t you stupid, dumb, an idiot or–Heaven forbid, a killer, but you are smart, healthy, doing your best, and you are one fantastic best friend.

And if you need any help, come over to my house.  I have dual vanities in my bathroom and I welcome your BFF any time.

I hate triangles.

I don’t mean the hypotenuse-geometry-gay-pride-symbol ones. I don’t mean the cute ones that swim under the sea with Sponge Bob and his cronies. I don’t mean the bright blocks kids sort when they haven’t yet learned to walk. I’m not even talking about the love ones, where someone slips out under the cover of darkness and slips under the covers in someone else’s bedroom.

I’m talking about the friendship triangles.

I mean the ones where three people like each other and really get along. But at some point, two gravitate toward each other and the other one, odd man “out”, feels–to repeat the word–left “out”.

It happens to everyone–at least I assume it does. Since I don’t know everyone, I have to guess here. I also guess that it’s a human condition to find someone to cling to, someone you like above every one else. The term best friend is more common than best friends with an S. I don’t see the term BFFS as much as I see BFF all over the girly clothes they’re selling to my 3rd grader. There it is–etched on a cotton/poly blend in pink, red and electric green, sized small, medium, large and huge–along with the dangerous undercurrent message that says “and you can only have ONE.”

Which is why–whenever my kids try to tell me their ‘best friend is…’ blah blah blah–I’m always the first one to say “HOLD IT RIGHT THERE. I already know your best friend.”

It happened just the other night. One of my children answered, “You do?” And I said, “I sure do. They’re in the bathroom right now.” And my child went quickly into the bathroom thinking someone–I know not whom–was in there, and that some kind of a surprise play date was under way.

And when my child rounded the corner into the empty water closet, and then went further into the sit-down section of the room and found still no one there, my child turned around to see me standing there, too. “There,” I said, with my arm raised and finger pointing at the young reflection in the mirror. “There’s your best friend, my dear. It’s YOU.”

This could seem to you anywhere from radical to ridiculous, or maybe you don’t care–which is fair enough. Not everyone has to care. But in my life, the term “best friend” was always associated not with the person I chose but with all the ones I didn’t. If I chose Susie over Maria, for example, Maria’s feelings got hurt. (And I can actually attest to that, as two winters ago I got the chance to apologize to “Maria” for really and truly choosing “Susie” over her back in high school. Of course 30 years and lots of maturity had erased the whole problem now. But the memory lingered–and Maria did feel that pain back then.)

It happens to all people from kids to adults–again, I’m guessing since I don’t know all people. But from what I’ve lived I know that most folks become 8 years old again when not invited, chosen, or otherwise included along with the others. And maybe it’s girls more than boys? Or the sensitive over the blasse? Either way, as I remind my children when they come home from school, forlorn due to some so-and-so excluding or ignoring them, I say, “sounds like you need your best friend.” And if they haven’t run screaming from the room saying “not the mirror agaaaaaaaain!” I march them into the bathroom and have them look at the reflection waiting there. “You see that kid? That’s your answer. That kid will see you through.”

What I don’t tell my kids–at least not yet, they’re too young, but I will eventually–is that it won’t be long before the friends who exclude–unless down the line they turn out both to be gay and fall madly love, which would be cool–will find others to drift off to. That’s kind of how life is, it’s how people evolve. Correct me if I’m wrong but usually people don’t evolve in lock step with their elementary school friends. Of course there are times when kids are meant to be best-est buddies for the rest of their lives–and God bless them. That then brings me to another lesson I teach my kids when–once again gnashing their teeth that they weren’t included, and that the triangle they thought they were in is really, it turns out, a line–from friend A to friend B–

“you can’t control other people. You can only control yourself.”

And since I’m already on the Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood Trolley here, let me throw this in, too:

“Whether someone likes you, doesn’t like you, includes you, excludes you, invites you, ignores you, and otherwise plays it strange and unfriendly–there is NOTHING that changes one simple fact: YOU ARE YOU. And you are the GREATEST. Nobody, nothing, nada changes that.”

And now I have a favor to ask you, all you who are reading this:

If I’m not around to remind my children of all these things; if by some God-forsaken reason the metastatic breast cancer beating its way through my immune system actually wins one of these days, and I don’t get to remind my kids over and over of all these important, love-yourself lessons as they “evolve” in their lives–I say ‘over and over again’ because that’s the way we all need to hear this self-esteem stuff before our true evolution finally occurs–

will you please tell them for me?