Ghost that Toxic Life-Lurking Friend
I have just lost 130 pounds! No, not from some radical diet or gonzo workout plan, I ghosted my toxic life-lurking pseudo-friend. We have been “friends” for a while now. I use that term in quotes in the same way I have “friends” on facebook.com.
We met about three years ago at our synagogue. I would sit in the lounge reading or working on my Hebrew. One day she wandered in she saw me sitting alone and asked to sit down. If I knew what a life-sucking parasite she would have become, I would have turtled into my headphones and focused on learning Hebrew.
We had a bunch in common, so connecting with her was easy. She was chatty and bubbly. It was easy to talk to her. She bragged a lot about her connections in defense consulting. I was looking for clients for my graphic design business.
We seldom saw each other, but we talked on the phone a lot. I would suggest coffee or dinner out she demurred. I should have known that she was a toxic life lurker (TLL), a friend who hangs out in your orbit but never is there when you need them. You call. They are busy. They need something, they suck up your time.
Abusive people are usually pretty charming. Otherwise, they would never get away with their predatory behavior. She wasn’t like my other friends. Most of my BFF’s are serious, like a fine whiskey, complex, robust, and sturdy. She was like a fruity drink at happy hour, you might not really want it, but you have it anyway because it is in front of you.
I thought I found someone like me, who was on the rise, hungry for business. We even talked about going into a partnership. We were going to be beltway bandits. It was exciting. Thrilling to think, I would get a stacked government contract. The only thing that came out of it was me doing work for her for free.
Even with these disappointments, I liked talking to her. As a lesbian who shops in the same aisle as men, I am pretty good at explaining why some guy was ditching her, which was pretty often. She was out on a date recently, she sat across the table from a nice guy who just wanted to take her out, and she told him that his six-figure salary was too low. But she didn’t stop there, she told him he should give up playing music on the weekends so he could earn more. Not surprisingly, the guy made a fantastic impression of a roadrunner, complete with a cloud of comical dust.
I would talk to her about my ex and work, and she gave me some good advice. Mostly that I should suck it up, get over it. Sometimes that is good advice. Sometimes that is precisely the advice you need.
But not all of her advice was good. When I was feeling discouraged about my business and thought I should get a “real job,” she said I would have to make some changes. My problem, she posited, was because I was too fat or that I didn’t look flirty enough, she wasn’t quite sure. But I should drop weight and put my boobs on display for the world, just in case.
Oy Vey.
We also had some political differences. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, and she is a soft righty with just a tinge of racial animus. During the election, she told me over and over that specific race problems were. Still, they were overblown, and the Dems were just trying to sow divisions.
After giving up on her own business, she got a job. After a short few months, she got fired from her last job because she referred to one of her colleagues in less than flattering terms that got her called into HR and then shown the door.
The final blow came on one of her long ranting telephone calls to me, where I had to stop her. She was talking about a person she knew at work whose husband had some mental problems and had to go on disability. The poor man lives on almost no money in public housing, and she was complaining bitterly about having to pay for him with her tax money.
It was too much for this liberal. I politely told her that I didn’t want to be friends with her anymore and hung up. I suppose the adult thing to do would be to write to her or tell her why I didn’t feel comfortable with her behavior, but then I thought I didn’t need to explain to her a damn thing. I don’t owe her anything. Maybe it is not the Jewish thing to do, which probably involves making a gefilte fish or serving mandelbrot of a cup of tea. I took a page out of Miriam’s book and just got the heck out.
At first, when I hit the red button on my phone, I felt a little shaky. It all happened so fast. But I felt so relieved at first, then a massive sense of what would happen if my TLL thought the call dropped or didn’t hear me or if she wanted to call me back and yell at me. What if she bad mouthed me?
Going full-on Casper just to be sure. I didn’t want the specter of her internet footprint, stepping all over me anymore. I cut off her calls, trimmed her texts, trashed her emails on Gmail, skipped her on skype, turned her off on twitter, blocked her on the book, and lost her on Linkedin.
I kept the bloated corpse of our relationship around way too long over some kind of nostalgia over the years. I let this woman in, and I shouldn’t have. I think of all the time that I spent listening to her kvetch on the phone, I want them back.
