Toxic People don't Come Back Because they Realize YOU'RE GOOD

"They always come back..." I've said it dozens of times with conviction.

I've never given someone up from a betrayal who didn't at some point, attempt to reenter my life.

I used to make it mean that eventually they know that I was one of their most loyal, trusted friends, and one day, they settled into acknowledgment of this fact. I was the loyal lab who'd tolerate getting hit while protecting the ones who hit me energetically speaking, and assumed one day after me walking the world alone, when they'd come to find me emaciated in the woods after kicking me hard enough and closing the door on me in the night, that this meant, they were as loyal to me, as I to them. Sweet pup.

So they'd creep into my inbox in agonizing apologies wanting to reunite, or text me out of the blue like nothing at all had happened between it-going-wrong, and the time they reached out. Depending on the severity of the rupture, I'd respond in kind, grateful at their attempt to be "kind."

I thought the fact that most people I ever really let in, came back around, meant that I was a good person.

But the stronger I get, the more I realize it has nothing to do with me being a "good person," and everything to do with being a person with a bad picker.

Them coming back has more to do with me choosing people who'd stab me in the back in the first place, than it has to do with them coming around to suture my wounds.

But that's a pattern I was raised on. The belief that "that's" just how relationships are.

When you inevitably get stabbed, if someone sits at your bed with stitches and some patience, "this" is called "love."

But "this" isn't love.

And me being a good person has nothing to do with the timing of their return, and everything to do with me being open enough, loyal enough to others sprinkled with a lack of loyalty to myself, to believe that THEY deserved my forgiveness if they pretend to want to stop the pain.

So for a long time, I let pain-inflictors back in, with half spoken apologies that i called "good enough," not because I was "good," but because they knew subconsciously that my picker was bad, and I was picked, to take advantage of for the next time they felt impulsive enough to pull out their knife or the sword of their tongue.

They didn't come around again because they realized I was good, and worthy of goodness, but because they knew I excused their wickedness when they encouraged me to prioritize their victimhood over mine while they perpetrated me but gaslit me out of that reality.

So I'm not so arrogant anymore to believe things along the lines of "they always come back," and make that mean anything other than...there's still open spaces on my back that haven't been stabbed yet and THAT'S why they're here.

Not because they see me differently at all. But because they know the parts of me that I associated with "goodness," would see them differently if only they asked.

I'm not lying to myself anymore that them coming back means I'm good. And they know it.

The truth is, them coming back is starting to mean to me, that anyone whose stabbed me in the back and acts like it's not a thing at all, is more symbolic of ME being in a BAD place with my back turned to reality to painful to look at, than them being in a GOOD enough place to see the good in my face.

Sheesh. The lies we tell ourselves to make sense of insanity are insane making. Because good people who do not-so-good things repair right away or they walk away....

…for good.