I recently told my therapist about a friendship which seems to be unraveling…or if not unraveling, certainly not gelling in the ways I had wanted to see it gel. After all, when someone doesn’t have time for you but appears to have time for other people, it’s time to question things. My therapist’s conclusion was, “It appears as though right now they don’t see you as particularly useful to them.”
His analysis did not shock or even pain me more than I was already pained; I had come to the same conclusion. He only verified it. So what to do?
- Leave them alone. This is a matter of self-respect, as well as respect for the other people in my life. If I spend time and energy reaching out to someone who is clearly too busy for me, I am siphoning away time and energy I could be spending on myself and on the people who do have time for me. If they ever decide they have time, they know how to get in touch with me. At that point I can decide whether I still have time for them.
- Resist the tendency to define my worth by their lack of attention. Their lack of attention is about them and their priorities, not about me and my worth. This does not mean their priorities are disordered. But if I base my sense of self-worth on whether or not someone is paying attention to me, I need to adjust my priorities. “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. [1 Corinthians 13:11]”
These things require a shift in my thinking, a shift which is proving to be easier than I imagined it could be. It helps that I have a lot of good things going on in my life right now. While it is on my mind (proven by my decision to write a blog post about it), I don’t obsess about it. It is what it is, and my life merrily rolls along.