You can't grow without mistakes

I can't even tell you how much feedback there has been to the last post.  Well, not quantitatively anyway, but there was a lot.  I got quite a few texts and messages asking, "is Courtney really pregnant?"  A few more along the lines of, "How are you handling this, with the miscarriage?" And the most common, "you're such a good sister."

Let me get this out there, because it's been bothering me.

I am NOT as good of a sister as you may think.  I may be a better sister today than I was even a couple of years ago, but there has been a lot of "construction" in my heart regarding interactions with people I love.

Years ago, my best friend started to spiral.  He was young.  I can only speculate as to why he started to make the decisions that he did, but things went downhill, and fast.  Drinking and street drugs became a big priority, and a couple of weeks before his eighteenth birthday, he added jailtime to his record.  Here's the thing--he's a great guy.  His heart is really tender and he loves fiercely, but for some reason he buries those beautiful qualities beneath the drugs and alcohol.

I didn't know what to do.  Watching him drown himself was the hardest thing that I've ever had to do.  And I wanted to stop it.  Stop him from hurting himself.  Stop him from hurting me and the other people who care about him.  Have you ever done that?  It's so painful to watch that sometimes you want to scream at them and shake them.  So I did.  I yelled.  I screamed.  I cried.  I swore.  I hit.  I prayed.  I confronted.  I kept silent.  I begged and pleaded with him.  We fought.  Nothing worked.

Absolutely.  Nothing.

I tried everything that I could think of to get him to change, to go back to the goofy, carefree boy I knew before.  But lost innocence has a face now instead of just being a foreign, poetic idiom.  We can't rewind and re-live.  This happened at a time in my life when I was just starting to understand that you can't change someone.  I had already absorbed it application to myself, and I'd learned it in reference to boyfriends, but friends?  Aren't they supposed to be different?

But they're still just people.  They're their own selves.  They're someone else's boyfriend or girlfriend.

So I guess not.

Don't be fooled--it wasn't clear so quickly.  But I'm starting to understand and time allows for clearer vision.  Now I know that instead of fostering change, my reaction had spawned frustration, disgust, and irritation.  It's a source of contention.  We were talking recently about my sister's situation, and I realized how deep I'd hurt him.

"You're right.  I did come down on you harder... ...and I would guess that you feel like [my sister] is getting a pass because she's having a baby.  And partially, that's true.  For me, I don't want her baby to have to carry the consequence of HER decision.  That doesn't mean I'm not disappointed.  Her and I have had some blunt and unpleasant conversations about different outcomes for her situations...

...I hope you can keep in mind that I'm growing too.  When you started down the path that you're on, that was my first time seeing someone I loved fall apart.  I was scared.  I wanted to scream at you until you understood that it was going to make life more complicated.  Harder.  And it didn't need to be.  I even remember being so upset that you were headed that way that I wanted to beat you.  I was so angry.

I know for sure that handling it the way I did wasn't the best way.  At the time, though, that was all I knew to do."

So MAYBE I'm handling this situation better.  MAYBE it's closer to the way it should have been with my best friend.  But I can tell you for sure, he's a large part of the reason WHY my reaction to Courtney's situation is the way it is. So when I see comments saying I'm a good sister, I get uncomfortable.  I feel squeamish inside.  I'm ashamed because I don't feel like that's true.  Otherwise, how did I alienate him?