all these demons were just people after all

I still struggle with the loss of the people who used to be my closest friends. They are amazing individuals who had to do what was best for themselves by cutting a selfish person from their lives. I want that person to not be me, but it is. I am self-absorbed and self-centered and my own needs come before everyone else. Always. I was much worse in high school, as people tend to be. I have always let my drama drag me down, and expected everyone else to sink with me. Very few people have had the courage to tell me this, but enough have done so that I actually started listening.

It is, and has always been, very hard for me to forgive and move on without an apology. This is a behavior that I got from my mom. It is a legacy I would like to leave behind me. It is something I have struggled with for a long time, but recently I've been thinking a lot more about it. I have been left irrevocably behind by people that I needed to keep close to me because they were the ones that would call me on my shit. But they're the ones I used so harshly that they gave up on me. So there's no going back, I suppose. And I need to stop trying to return to past relationships when it's clear those people have no wish for me to come back. If they did, I would have heard from them.
It's hard to let go. Let me use names, real names, not the myriad of aliases I've constructed here. Elley, Sharyn, Jared, Sascha, Sin, Matt, I miss you all. I have wronged you. But I can't help but feel that, even if you were on speaking terms with me, we would still be barely speaking. Because that's how it was before you dropped me, so I guess there's really not much loss over all. And Ariel, I miss you too. I regret how I treated you and it's so kind that you didn't just completely cut me from your life. I will never have a friendship like that with anyone else, and I wish I still had it with you. But like I said, there's no going back.

I have changed. Sure. It's so easy to say that. Death has changed me. It started when AJ died and only increased with my mother's death. There are a lot of people that I miss that I didn't really appreciate when I had them. Maybe they think of me. They probably don't. I don't think too often of the people that I left behind for my own sanity's sake.

I want everything. But I forget that in order to take, I must first give. And when you take too much, then there's nothing left, no matter how many times you apologize.