I've gained a second mutually accountable friend

02 Mar, 2026

Two observations:

1.

My old translation group is absolutely running better without me now that I've passed everything off successfully. Just observing what they're getting done from the side, it all looks great. I feel a kind of admiration for this now. I wonder if anyone ever felt this way when I was running the place. Idk if I would deserve that though, granted how bad I did the delegating. Everything feels way more collaborative now. While I ultimately wasn't the best, I guess I was good enough for starting this group and setting up the basic structure. There's nothing I can do to change how I went about this in the past, even though I can't seem to stop myself from thinking about how I didn't do things better. Regardless, I think without a personality like mine around, people will actually feel like their efforts are more appreciated. I definitely think that I'm not suited to run groups; people should just give me tasks that I can work on quietly in my own corner. (More proof that astrology is fake as hell. Not that I ever believed it anyway.)

2.

I underestimated the emotional intelligence of some of my friends. There's someone who I had pinned as a person I was supposed to "help" for all these years I knew her, and she's actually helping me as much in turn now. I really didn't realize that, admist all of her insecurities, she really has a clear head when it comes to the emotions of others. Some of the stuff she has said to me recently reminds me of things my therapist would say in session, and she somehow came to that knowledge all by herself since she hasn't been in therapy recently. For years I was thinking of her as one of the people I "took on" to play a helpful role in the lives of, but behaving that way meant that our relationship didn't get to grow past a certain point. She was actually the first rejection-sensitive person to both call me out for something hurtful I did to her and then to actually forgive me — to the point that she doesn't even remember the incident when I brought it up again after all of these years because I had never forgiven myself for it even though I did apologize and change my behavior.

Previously, the only other person who had ever forgiven me for something hurtful I did was a friend who was incapable both of shame and what we understand as empathy (feeling an emotion when someone seems to be displaying it in your vicinity). Given those traits of theirs, it was naturally easier to accept that they'd let me move past a wrong I had made. After all, their memory is hyper-oriented towards facts and not feelings, which actually let them change for the better faster than any other person I had ever met; so I've just regarded them as an outlier this whole time. Rather, I took it as a personal fault that I couldn't seem to make friends with other people as blunt and unfazed as them. I had the mistake of being so critical yet sensitive — this combination meant that I would naturally have to wear a tiring mask around those with rejection sensitivity instead of doing the rational thing known as making non-rejection-sensitive friends. In a way, I kind of thought I deserved this for being an impossible person. Given how annoyingly full of contradiction I was, naturally the only thing I could do was hang around rejection-sensitive people who needed me, masking all the while, feeling like I was pouring my energy into them while never being able to tell them if they did something to hurt me. Rather, I feigned that certain things they did didn't hurt me because I prioritized making them feel better above all else. That was my role, and that was one of the only ways I could ever approximate something like being a good human.

Of course, no one ever manages to be a self-assigned martyr without the negativity seeping out somewhere. Moments in which I indulged in negativity — whether it was chiming in on other people's us-versus-them mentality by dunking on random people's posts we all shared, or moments where I just threw up my hands and expressed that nothing could ever be changed, so I (or other people I dragged into this) would just have to suffer another person's detrimental behavior for as long as an activity would exist — were pretty prevalent a few years ago. It's only over time that I've slowly worked on unlearning these ways of functioning, and it's partly because of the actual times I got pushback, from this friend included. In the past, I used to just take my negative slip-ups as evidence that I was truly a bad person and there was no fixing me besides mask harder, isolate more, hide bad parts as much as you can.

I don't actually know when this part of me changed.¹ After all, when I hurt my friend by taking out my negativity on her when I was actually frustrated with someone else I never confronted, I did not feel grateful in the slightest for her telling me that I had fucked up. Rather, it felt like a grade report had been issued: our friendship was basically over and I had to be on my best behavior for her for the remaining time if I was ever going to salvage a C from this F. Sometime after, I recall that I told someone I didn't even know how much I liked this friend as a person; maybe I just liked feeling smart when I was able to say the right things to help her out, aka I was fulfilling my duty to her and gaining reassurance that I still had a good role to someone.

This question of not knowing how much I liked my friends is one that's also been bothering me for the past years, especially as the last batch of friends I made - nearly all people I mentally marked as needing my help — continued to seem to need me beyond the point in time that I had expected, much in a similar way that my translation group seemed to be dragging on far longer than I had anticipated. Before this, I didn't have to think much about whether I liked someone because what was more important was whether I could stand talking to them and whether they wanted my emotional support. I floated away from people that had it emotionally together and hung around people I imagined as having more of a desperate tether to me. Every time I felt tired playing someone's therapist, the idea of liking them as people continued to slide further away from me. What was the point of quantifying "like," anyway? Did the love my parents claimed to have for me stop them from using me and taking turns abandoning me emotionally (and at times, physically)? I did the inverse of my parents: I didn't love my friends, but I was basically always there for them emotionally even if I didn't want to be. If they didn't see this as love, so what?

Of course, I didn't see this as love much either. Every time my therapist said that I cared about my friends, I doubted them and made them qualify what "care" meant. "I don't need them, though," I'd say, "if they wanted to stop being friends with me tomorrow, I would be perfectly fine and only mourn that I didn't have anyone to talk about my interests with. (And then I'd go find new people to restart the cycle.)" My therapist would then specify that I cared deeply about my friends' suffering to the point that I would continue to show up when I didn't want to. In fact, my therapist told me, I was hyperloyal. Most people don't stick around when a friend gets lost in medical school and can't talk to them for something like 6 months at a time. Most relationships break after one year of communication decreasing beyond what one (or both) of the parties wants, after all. Huh? I was thinking. How am I hyperloyal when my own friends probably don't even think I love them? When I can't even say that I love them myself?

But thinking it over now, from my perspective at least, I was putting in way more effort than my friends were for me even though they claimed to like me much more deeply than I would ever profess for them. This was also partly because I refused to rely on them; when I did, it was because I felt like I couldn't take it anymore, and I regarded myself worse for every time that I did. I would tell myself that me relying on them wasn't the correct role; they were supposed to rely on me, and then they would decide when they didn't need me anymore. That was the script. Granted that I decided beforehand to make our relationships unequal, it was only natural then that I displayed far more caring than I received. This fact has now made me realize that the desire for someone's friendship is actually completely separate from the level of care provided. I think people often assume these things much be correlated — after all, we use "care" simultaneously to mean "thinking a lot about," "worrying about the well-being of," and "taking actions to help someone." Some of my friends had primarily the first and maybe second parts, while I had most of the second and maximized the third. But some of them wanted the first part from me, while I secretly wanted the third part from them even though I would never ask for it.

I still think actions are more important than thoughts. So given everything, I will actually say that I gave far more "care" than I received. If it wasn't like that, I wouldn't have stayed in the friendships. I didn't even hide this fact. I would tell people this if it came up in conversation because it was the best way to explain why I didn't fawn over others and was fine if they felt like abandoning me. Masking that I was fine with their hurtful actions or that I was excited about whatever they were talking to me about even when I couldn't care less was fundamentally different from acting like a completely different person that was super interested in everything about them, after all. If I had to explain myself, then nothing would be better than the truth. Or most of the truth, with these other parts of my masking omitted.

Even as I said all of these things to explain why I was weird, I got the sense that maybe I was being a bad friend by not having the core burning affection that other people wanted from me. Maybe telling them I didn't have it was going to make them think that I didn't think they were lovable. It was always hard to tell. But I said it anyway, because, in the end, it wouldn't actually matter; when they realized that they wanted people who loved them in that way, they'd choose to end their relationship with me. The longer people stuck around, though, the guiltier I got for not "loving" correctly. I was there to problem-solve with them as much as I could and try to walk them through their emotions in to 2-to-3 hour conversations, but that was about it. But hey, wasn't that okay? They were using me for unlicensed and therefore way-less-effective therapy, and I was using them to have a conversation partner and to try to give some proof to my own ego that I wasn't a lost cause who should go kill zirself ASAP.

So what does one do when you end up in a situation where you're half at fault in making your relationships with others fundamentally uneven but you also think that it's fine because it has a deadline anyway? And then it turns out not to have a deadline? Well.

The problem for me was that I had all of these logics and rules about my role, and as long as I never unlearned this, I'd just be stuck where I was forever. The "role" was a maladaptive coping mechanism that allowed me to accomplish a lot (a bunch of translation projects, hours and hours of talking to people about their problems, past my limits, which seemed to be more successful than not), but it also hurt some people somewhere in the process. The whole time I was just thinking it was because I wasn't doing the process right, but actually the whole process had to be thrown out. I had to just admit that some things aren't for me, after all. I can't play this role anymore. It wasn't a good role. I'm not proud of it, actually. I don't know if it actually let me help anyone more than if I had just pushed back early on and established boundaries, threw in the towel, and let them find people that were better equipped to grow with them.

The first rejection-sensitive friend to both rightfully reject an action I took and forgive me when I proved that I could be better has given me the key to leaving the idea of my "role" behind. I actually didn't realize how badly I needed to be shown that relationships could get stronger from conflict if both parties were willing, that you could still be wanted and valued even after you had done something wrong. That it wasn't just some sin that they would be secretly taking out of their back pocket every time they needed a reason to be mad at you. I didn't realize that all this would come from someone enforcing their boundaries and communicating clearly what they needed and expected from me. I mean, the fact that I had failed to intuit the boundary from the beginning meant I was toast, right? Not so, it turns out.

I really thought this whole time that I was helping my friend and that she couldn't really help me in return. That's why I was going to therapy and stuff, right, so other people didn't have to help me? Besides, how much could someone who had their hands full with their own insecurities help me, anyway? Wouldn't that just trap them into the same role that I was playing? — As much as I played the role I assigned myself, I absolutely loathed the idea of forcing someone else to take up that mantle for me. I guess I always knew that it was unfair, and I resented it even as I tried to tell myself that this was just my lot in life. (Thanks, Mom and Dad!)

Rejection isn't the worst thing that can happen to you. Sometimes it gives you the chance to grow. I know that, now.

I talked about my seeming inability to love my friends the "right way" yesterday with this friend and asked her if she had ever gotten the sneaking suspicion that I didn't care about her. She told me that she had never felt that way. She felt that I had always shown up for her and the occasions we clashed were moments for her to grow and improve her own communication.

I cried.

And then something weird happened. After realizing that she was more than capable of giving me caring actions too, that she actually saw me and accepted me for my limitations, and that she was someone who was both willing to grow on her own and with me, I realized that this was a relationship that I had already grown in.

Some months ago, I wrote in some blog post that I only knew one person I was accountable with. I now know two people I am accountable to, who are equally accountable to me. And this is with someone I never imagined it being possible with, who I had so, so severely underestimated.

It's been a while since I've felt so grateful for someone in my life. I actually feel secure in this relationship now, and that itself has finally unlocked the emotion of great affection for her as a person. This last part that I thought I just didn't have² is there, now. It was actually possible, after all. I guess I finally have all three parts of "care" for not one, but two people in my life. Two very different people, at that.

Something I've been thinking about recently thanks to Agasawa Koucha's works is that you should like the person you are in a given relationship. That the best relationships are ones that bring out the best parts of you, where you don't find yourself acting in ways that you hate yourself for. This whole time, I've been acting in a way that I didn't particularly like myself for. Rather, I hated myself sometimes. As Azuma says in this most recent episode (8) of You and I Are Polar Opposites, I wasn't taking care of myself. I didn't understand that taking care of yourself also means actively placing yourself in situations and relationships where you genuinely feel like you can improve. That you can like yourself a little more.

I like the person I am in these two friendships.

Today, I asked this friend for some emotional advice. She was way more helpful than I expected in telling me what I can and cannot reasonably do in a situation, and she reads the things I say in the kindest ways to me. I don't actually even know if it's deserved, but she looks at the things I say and tells me I'm not so bad, after all. I'm not so broken. I hope it's true, but if it isn't, I'm going to work my way to being that person that she sees.

The best part is that I can say all of these things to her and she takes it all well. I don't have to play the guessing game of whether I'm being too blunt, too forward, too truthful, guilting someone into something, setting up expectations that the other person will feel obligated to fulfill against their will. If I do something wrong, she'll let me know and tell me how I can make it up to her. I don't have to guess.

God, it feels so good to not have to guess.

Today I feel immensely grateful for people who have given me the chance to grow and to be better. I may not be good for everyone, but there are two people on this earth who I can be good enough for. I feel somewhat embarrassed that I didn't see this all earlier, but the only thing I can do forward is to appreciate this friend as much as I can.

A relationship is collaborative. From now on, I want to choose relationships in which we both like ourselves more for working things out together.

Notes:

#hoping #life-logging