Member-only story
If there has been a subtheme in my life for a period of time, it was betrayal. Some people I loved, trusted, and confided in have put knives in my back, which I understood at the time, but those same people tried to be secretive about it and cover their tracks.
In their defense, I was a hard person to love, and there was a lot of pressure on them to not be friends with me. Some people stood by me through thick and thin, and those are the friends I still keep in touch with regularly.
I understand it is uncomfortable to put a knife in your friend’s back, and the instant reflex is to cower away when that person gets wind that you were behind the betrayal. But I also felt that those people misunderstood me profoundly and jumped to premature conclusions.
“Forget them,” a close friend told me. “They were never your real friends anyway.”
As much as I would like to believe that real-life advice, and as much as it may be true, I want to believe there’s another way, a better way to deal with betrayal. I loved the people who betrayed me for a reason earlier, and I recognized the need to wallow, for a little bit. I recognized the need to allow myself to let the tears roll and get heated with anger before…
