Today was the day I was meant to be leaving for England. I couldn't get the money back for the hotel or the flight, so it was a loss of about $2500 down the drain, when we really needed that money pretty badly, and I couldn't go, either, because I was no longer welcome at the event I booked the flight and hotel for.
And it's painful because it's a once in a lifetime event that would be an experience I would never get ever anywhere else--it would be the first time I would ever get to meet people I know online en masse (I've met a grand total of three: one art friend for NaNoWriMo, one community friend sharing my home city, and the third is my fiance), and it'd allow me to have met the friends of my friends. I wanted to be there on their most important day, I wanted to be there for them, I wanted to see their one of a kind wedding, I wanted to support them and to have fun and experience things with them.
I wanted them to share their world with me. I wanted to be a part of their world. I wanted to experience it with them and celebrate them and cheer them on and watch in awe as the two people I valued most at the time I was invited (who remain the second and third most important people to me and they always will be) were united. I knew they were going to have an amazing and incredible wedding, truly unique and filled with nerdy things as they are, a wonderful day sure to be joyous.
I knew my part would be small. I'd just be there, I'd watch, I'd clap, I'd dance and talk and go to events, but I would still be there, a part of their world on their most important day, in person, and give my good vibes to their joy. I'm an empath so being surrounded by the people they most love and appreciate who love and appreciate them, would let me experience the full breadth and depth of their love and to live vicariously in the moment, and help show them that love.
But now it's the day I was meant to leave, and I haven't. So now above all other days it's officially official. I'm not going to be there. I knew I wasn't going to be there, obviously. I carried no false hopes of attending. I knew I wasn't going to anymore after what happened in December (which really happened in July and August and was discovered in December). You don't get invited to something after having gotten uninvited from it.
But it's different to know that in your head, versus actually living through the proof of it. It works the other way, too. It was one thing to know I was going to visit my partner. It was another when I actually got to see them for the first time. It was one thing to plan to bring my partner back to Washington. It was another to have actually done so. In the moment, it didn't seem real until it was. And those moments were joyous ones where I couldn't believe it until it happened and I had that happiness.
In the same vein as I couldn't believe those moments of happiness until I had them, today it was hard to believe the moment of despair and emptiness and loss and loneliness, until it happened and was before my eyes. I'm not on a flight to England. I'm not going to be picked up by my friend and driven to the hotel. I'm not going to check in there. I'm not going to be out and about in that town. I'm not going to experience the area, and be given a tour. I'm not going to go to any events. I'm not going to be there.
And...it hurts. A lot. It's hard not to. There's silver linings to be had, but a large part of me will always feel like I would've preferred the alt-world where I got to go there and experience all of that and more.
And it's accompanied by thinking about everything that went wrong last year.
My friends had a vent about an echo chamber, with building frustration towards a community and in particular that community's streamer. But we didn't realize that via the negative feedback spiral/loop, we were building our very own echo chamber. We were making the problem worse than it was. It's stupidly obvious now, and highly ironic. I cry-laughing about the stupidity of us all and regret everything. But it happened, and I got sucked in. My friends got deeper and deeper into this, from March until it came to a head on July 23rd, my 30th birthday.
Everything went wrong, and despite our good intentions, despite us having wanted to make things better, to fix the problems we had perceived, to try and help people, things all fell apart.
My then-friend (and now fiance) was the person the streamer believed to be a mastermind, on a nonexistent burn book server. I got into a heated argument with my friends. I believed the most important thing to do was to help our friend, who had just lost everything. I knew they were suicidal, so bad they had even written a suicide note, knew how to go through with it, and were going to, and I was fighting to save their life. My friends believed our friend (my fiance now) deserved to be removed/cancelled for things they had done unrelated to being involved in the echo chamber which negative spiral looped into being the harmful thing it was.
Because I knew my friend was suicidal, I was upset, emotionally compromised because I had fallen in love with that friend on July 16th, and I said many harmful things to my friends, alienating them. And worse, a lot of it very visibly public, on this very blog.
I went effectively radio silent publicly, despite publicly reflecting on the events. That was a mistake because I never shared my growth. I never let anyone see on my blog my regret. I never let people see I had realized I was in the wrong, we were in the wrong. I never let people see I had worked on myself. I never let people know I was already trying to atone for my sins, to work to redeem myself for all of my mistakes.
I never explained anything in full. I only left damning hints which made things sound much worse than they were, at least for my personal perspectives and involvement and whatnot.
I left a very visible trail of harm, and then did the work of realizing it was a trail of harm in private, leaving no public record of me having worked on myself and knowing I fucked up.
When my friend did touch base with me on the issue, I made numerous mistakes. I thought they knew I was involved, when they didn't know. I thought putting the incident in the past was for the best, and didn't want to revive it by talking to them about it. I thought explaining what happened would only make things worse, and I thought they were better off not knowing, I thought they would be hurt and have their idealism damaged by me sharing. I didn't want to poison them with my knowledge, so I didn't share...but that was a mistake.
They wanted me to share. They reached out and were my friend. They considered me ride-or-die enough to invite to their wedding, so they trusted me and wanted me to trust them. I failed to display trust in them and in doing so, I inadvertently betrayed their trust in me.
Everything which could have gone wrong, did, and it is all my fault. I could have done anything different.
I could have listened to my instincts when I identified the red flags of the echo chamber being an echo chamber. When I had thoughts of "that doesn't seem right...", I should have listened. When I almost invited my friends to the server but didn't because I didn't want them to get dragged into the drama, that should've been a red flag telling me we had all gone down the wrong path. I should've been encouraging us to consider other perspectives, including that we might've been wrong, biased, etc.
I should have maintained my calm and avoided lashing out at my friends with vitriol. I should have avoided making nasty public comments which were highly incriminating. I should have shared my remorse and regret publicly rather than keeping it close to my chest privately. I should have opened up to my friend when they reached out.
I did everything possible wrong and literally nothing possible right.
And today I face the ultimate proof of the consequences of those actions and inactions.
I'm not there.
I'd have arrived by now, or close to.
I will live my entire life thinking about how it was the perfect storm of everything possible going wrong--how if literally anything else were different, literally so much as a single thing had been done better, then I would be there with my friends, celebrating their life and having their wondrous occasion be something I get to experience.
And now...I get none of that.
Because I did do everything wrong.
At the end of 2023, during a symbolic syllable, I tossed 'Bree' into the fire as something I wanted to leave behind in 2023.
And for good reason, because what I was then needs to die. All of it. Every mistake I made built up to cause great harm and then greater harm. All the good I had done for years, destroyed in a matter of days. Friendships I had for years, ended overnight because of my failures. And the pain and suffering to follow. I hurt the people closest to me, most important to me, so badly, they felt they had to cut me out of their lives entirely or all-but-entirely.
And there's nothing I can do, but live with it.
All I can do is what I have already been trying to do.
Do better.
There's no making things right.
But I can at least try to learn from my failures and do better.
I deleted the harmful blogs nearly three months ago. It was three months too late a gesture, but I knew the harm those blogs had caused, I knew their existence was harmful, so I got rid of them. It doesn't make things better, but it can help prevent things from getting worse.
I've been stepping up my game with my empathy and joy and positivity. I've been helping more people than ever before, getting them through their lower points, offering my support. I can make them laugh, I can give them joy, I let them see the light of day. And I'm getting better and better at doing that, to more and more people.
I've been opening up more. I continue to not know how much of my life I should share with the friend I hurt who wanted me to open up to them back in September. They set a boundary of minimal interaction, and I don't want to cross that by dumping them, especially not trauma dumping them. I don't want to overwhelm them, especially not so close to the day of their most joyous occasion. I can never give them any negativity or burden right before they are to be wed.
But at the same time, they did ask me to open up and share more with them, so I continue to not really know how to balance the two. I'm trying to mostly play it by ear and listen to my instincts as much as I can, and I figure right now I'm probably making the right call in not unloading on them? It's just my best guess, trying to do my best, and I will live every day wondering what I should do until we talk more.
Like, should I ask for more clarity? Share my well-wishes? Say nothing still? I am unsure, and I'm sure they probably would say I have made yet another mistake by having not done what I ought to. I don't know what the right thing to do is, I only have my best guesses at this point, and I am guessing at everything, and I only have my hopes that I have learned enough to guess correctly.
And I am also trying to see the silver linings in everything.
I saved the life of my fiance. No matter what they did, they deserve to live. And because they deserve to live, my saving their life no matter the consequences could never be a bad thing.
I unlocked a new level of empathy. I previously wasn't thinking of others' perspectives and thinking enough about views beyond those of myself and those in my life.
In my period where I was at my lowest, I had breakthroughs in my plurality only made possible by going into my mind, which could only happen in the depths of depression. I learned things about myself I otherwise wouldn't have.
I got a better idea of what I need to do to balance my life.
I got to get an apartment, and get to spend the rest of my life with the love of my life.
I don't have to leave my fiance for a full week and come back after Valentine's Day has ended.
I get to celebrate Valentine's Day in-person with my fiance.
I get almost the entire month of February off from work. That gives me plenty of time to clean, stream, do content creation, and have time with my fiance which I otherwise would not have had.
I get to go on a double date with an irl friend and their date, with my fiance.
I get to go to a Sapphic Valentine's Day dance party I otherwise wouldn't have gotten to go to.
I got spiritually awakened and have begun my journey of spiritual awakening.
Repeatedly, across multiple readers, I've been told the same thing over and over again. "What happened needed to happen.", and now it did. To change into the best version of myself, I needed to have people get a brush with the worst version of myself and want nothing to do with me after having seen a glimpse of it.
To become who I am meant to be, I needed to have that version of me living in the comfort die.
And those who have chosen to stick by me are now all the more valuable. Those who stuck by me despite knowing what I have done, have become all the more important and valued and cherished to me. I am also able to make many more new connections I otherwise wouldn't have had the time to make, because I would've been elsewhere doing comparatively little. I have bonded with more, I have gotten invested in more. I am just as a whole, more.
And that's all good.
It's not all bad.
But the pain in days like this sure makes it hard to see the good, because my mind is filled with all the remorse and regret from the bad. The feelings of loneliness, of depression, of not belonging, of not deserving, they are there, and I always wonder if those who cut me out were right to characterize me as that way. What if I really was a monster, what if I really don't deserve good things, what if, what if.
Still, I try to remember who I am, who I really am, and while there's a great many things I don't know, while there's much to discover, I still have a lot I need to learn. While I may not know all of that. I do know a lot about myself which is true. The bad things are certainly true, to at least some extent...but so too are the good things. And they shine brighter and brighter, filling more and more of who I am.
I am a good person. I am kind. I am caring. I am empathetic. I'm an entertainer. I'm a figure of wisdom. I'm a figure whose lack of knowledge is funny. I bring joy. I bring positivity. I uplift others. I am valued by others. I am loved. I love people so damn much. I have more love than I know what to do with. I try to do the right thing. I do more good than harm. I help a lot of people. I have a bright future ahead of me. I am creative. I am passionate. I am filled with energy. I have a ton of ideas. I like to share with the world. I want the best for everyone. I try to see things from every perspective, including those who think I am not all of these things.
I have my flaws, to be sure, and I am very human. I have my failings. I have my issues. I have areas I lack knowledge/understanding I ought to have. I have bad habits.
But I also accomplish a lot. I have a lot to be proud of, with the caution of not letting that pride poison my accomplishments. I have a lot of good to offer the world, I have a lot of good coming my way, and I have a lot of good to bring just by living.
I hope that's okay to say to those who have seen my negative side. That, yes, it's okay for me to keep going. I can never undo what I did. And things will never be the same as they were before. I probably have lost all of those friendships forever. I will live forever with that hole in my heart, and a rather massive one at that, because those people mattered more to me than they will ever know. The love I have for them is greater than they will ever realize, and even if they never reciprocate, those feelings will never go away for me.
Yet, life goes on, and I have a beautiful life to live. The lives they live are going to be beautiful as well, and there will be an eternal sadness and longing for our beautiful lives to have been intertwined for longer than it ended up being entwined. Knowing it's over though, I can go on to accomplish greater things. They are always welcome back, if they think me to be worthy, but they are also valid if they think I am not worthy, that nothing I can do will ever be enough atonement. Still, we should all go pursue our happiness.
I will welcome their happiness into mine if they want it, and have them remain separate if they want it. I will respect their wishes, their desires, their paths, their boundaries. I will go on my path as they go on theirs. And they are going to be brilliant wonderful worlds to have traveled within.
I know I have a long ways to go yet.
But I want to pursue getting it.
And all the while, remember.
I have such love, for all of you. Including any who would read this.
You are always welcome to read this.
I know it's long. You're not going to. Nobody does. But if you chose to, then you are welcomed and appreciated. And I have love for you.
I'm going to be happy, eventually, even if I'm not right now.
I hope the same can be said for you, too, and I will be all too happy to help you pursue it. <3