HOW I LEARNED TO BE PRO-ACTIVE IN CULLING TOXICITY FROM MY LIFE

I am a social butterfly. I meet people all the time. As a returning college student and something of a free spirit, I jump right into social situations. I'll literally be friends with anyone. Like, for real. Perhaps that is to make up for the fact that, believe it or not, I was not always like this. I was so shy in kindergarten that my teacher thought I could not talk, and as a little Black girl in the American South in the 1980s, I was not about to get the kind of testing and care that I deserved. So, my mother warned me that unless I said something at school, I would wind up in the "special" class. So, I talked when spoken to, and that was it.

The rest of my school years would be characterized by relentless bullying - be it for being fat, for being gay, for whatever weakness the other kids smelled on me that week. By the end of third grade, I was cowed. In fourth grade, I went to a new school (at that point, the first school I went to only went from four--year-old kindergarten to third grade). It got even worse, because I had a racist teacher. We lived right by the railroad tracks, and I was just a couple of minutes late daily. That was also the year I got put into the gifted class, which met once per week. The teacher hated me, as I was the only black child in that gifted class. She would hold me back and make me late to that class every week, so I would have to walk in while everyone else was already settled. This went on the entire school year. Mercifully, at the end of that year, my parents bought the house I would spend the rest of my childhood in, and I switched schools yet again.

The new school was no better. I was still the same shy, fat, nerdy kid who did not know how to make friends. I would remain so through high school graduation, bullied for one reason or another - being fat, being gay, being shy, whatever. Kids know weakness and despair, and they'll sniff it out and make your life miserable when they smell it on you.

To that end, I did not have the developmental adolescence many people did. By the time I got to college at a large university, I saw the chance to cultivate a new image for myself. I started working in a gay bar, I had lost lots of weight, and suddenly I was this cool, glittery party kid who everyone loved. But, that paved the way for me to have a lot of toxic friendships as well. Almost every close friendship I had in those early years was controlling in some way. Things were fine until I dared tell them no, or say I didn't want to do something, or simply disagreed with an opinion. I tended to attract people who knew I would be grateful that they just wanted to be my friend. This would go on for many years. Then, that morphed into being friends with people who did not share my values. Most recently, that meant being friends with people who supported Donald Trump.

Now, everyone who knows what racism looks like knows that Trump is a racist. He was sued repeatedly by the Nixon Administration for racial discrimination in his real estate business. He led the lynch mob for the Central Park Five, and still wanted them executed even after they were exonerated with DNA evidence. He was the Grand Wizard of the Birther movement to delegitmize the nation's first Black president. He said a Mexican-American judge could not do his job due his heritage. And on, and on, and on. And yet still, somehow, I managed to befriend people who voted for this guy, even though I am a Black lesbian living in the American south. Recently, though, I have decided I just can't. My life does not matter to these people, and constantly grappling with that idea is toxic to me. There is no reconciling befriending people who value tax cuts more than they value my basic humanity. So, slowly but surely, I have begun to cull these people, and it is the most freeing feeling in the world. The second their racism or some other abhorrent viewpoint peeps out, I cut it off. Sometimes I don't even say anything. I just quit talking to them. I am now realizing what real friendship looks like, and it isn't this. It isn't people who are casually - or even overtly- racist, or try to control me. It isn't people who seek me out because they think I am weak. I might come off as an abrasive ball buster these days, but at least I stand up for my values and what I believe in. Life is too short for toxic people, no matter who those might be to you.

Cover Image via Photo by Alex Nemo Hanse on Unsplash