(Updated 11/262023)

Being of service to those in need can be a taxing act, mostly when they take advantage of your free time to be there for them. Two things they request become twenty, and they feel no remorse towards your discomforts about it.

They have the luxury of not knowing what it’s like to be the person worth avoiding or ignoring, simply because they refuse to act as if they’re not afraid to lose you.

They will even dare to ask you where others are. Ones they expect to be there during their “hour of need” based on circumstantial ties.

But when you’re gone, when your time is limited only to yourself and no one else, they will do everything they can to shame you for your choices. They might even love bomb you back onto your radar.

Naturally, the other weapons hide in the love bombing. The classic guilt trips, the passive aggression, the very things that drove others to resent being kind enough to help them any time they could. Curling their toes as they fear the reaction when they tell them “no.”

It’s even sadder when their reaction doesn’t come immediately. Their toxicity shows when they come for you weeks or months later, to get that victory you denied them long ago.

It’s not our fault that they refuse to see how damaging they are to people they claim to love. If that love is conditional to their servitude, they cannot expect to have the sentiment be returned. At least not with the same energy.

In the end, we serve these people because of who they are in themselves. We may risk loving the person the abuser could have been, versus who they’ve chosen to be.

And the most important feeling of all? Our boundaries, our distance will show them how much we love ourselves more than we may love the abuser again.

D.F.