Betrayal

This is how betrayal feels when you’re already curled up in pain.

They betray you by offering their support, by telling you the lies that they care, that all you need to do is ask and they’ll be there. They offer generosity but when you let your guard down, when you assume you can reveal the most broken, most sick, most desperate version of yourself, they abandon and reject you without a second thought and obliterate you from their mind. The shoot arrows into the sky as an outlet for theeir own pain and care not if they hit you. You suffer and they barely remember.

The betrayal is the invisibility of it…. the willful turning away …. the dismissal… the failure to appreciate the daily reality of it all, the failure to even try, to even want to.

The betrayal is believing they are offering support, that they are drained by supporting you, when their discomfort with your pain means you are most often tasked with supporting them instead to minimize or deny the pain.

The betrayal is the insistence, the insistence that if you just speak up, ask for help, tell people how to support you, they will.

The betrayal is that despite all the convincing they are of their best intentions, they justify their limitations to help, and resent you for expecting too much from them.

The betrayal is the lies we perpetuate and that I fall for time and time again.

Betrayals of family, friends, medical systems, government welfare, society.

Its the bleeding it out in isolation and when you resurface, pretending that it all didn’t happen. It’s the rewriting of history, it’s the pretending, the reversion back to the lies, that when the situation is TRULY dire, that the behaviors would somehow be different. There is something that could happen that would outpouring of support, you just haven’t suffered that badly yet. A noose around the neck, is just not that bad.

The betrayal is the belief that others have affection for me, that they can’t verbalize, that they care, they just don’t know how to act, that they’d feel a sense of loss if I died tomorrow but can’t interact with me today in any way that feels positive. It’s the futility of that truth, the meaninglessness of it, the anger that I am supposed to recognize this and find solace that others care deep in their hearts when their actions only hurt. That I am the one who expends energy, time, in the sorrows and hurt and my absence from their life doesn’t really register as a blip on their radar. That I don’t have the right to say it aloud, to hold anyone accountable, to be mad or angry or upset, but I am hurtful or unethical by imposing distance for my own self-protection.

You don’t stab me in the back. To do that, you’d have to get up close, you’d have to touch me and feel my body and witness the blood on your hands. You shoot from a distance and ride away in the night and forget. You are unscathed and return to your life that occupies every facet of your mind.