Where's your usual steadiness? Where's the person who normally sees things clearly? You're letting something small wreck you. People took advantage while you were distracted — call it what it is, and call the ones who did it what they actually were, not what you'd hoped they'd be. But nothing lacking in you caused this. You just found out who a few people were.
None of this is rare. None of it is even surprising, if you're honest. It's like being annoyed at getting splashed crossing a busy street — this is what the street is. Life isn't a careful, padded thing. You signed up for a long road, and long roads include stumbling, collisions, exhaustion, the moment you say "I can't do this anymore" and don't quite mean it. You'll leave people behind on this road. You'll bury some of them. You'll be afraid more than once. That's not a malfunction. That's just the road.
Grief and worry and slow decline aren't ambushes waiting somewhere ahead — they're already seated at the table you're eating at.
You can't avoid that company. But you can stop flinching every time you notice they're there. And the way you do that is by expecting them long before they show up — rehearsing the hard thing in your mind before it happens, so it doesn't get to catch you off guard. People who've prepared for a blow take it standing. People who haven't go to pieces over nothing.
So — your people betrayed you. Fine. So have plenty of others, in worse ways: robbed, lied to, actually hurt, not just inconvenienced. Whatever's happened to you has happened to someone else too, and will happen again, because it's not a personal curse, it's just what falls out of being alive and in relation to other people. There isn't a version of existence with the sharp edges filed off. That's not the same as saying it doesn't hurt. It's saying you're not being singled out.
Winter comes, we get cold. Summer comes, we sweat. Some seasons cost us something. We don't get to renegotiate that arrangement — we only get to decide whether we meet it with dread or with a straight back. I don't think the goal is liking what happens to us. I think it's refusing to waste energy fighting the fact that it happened at all, and putting that energy instead into how we carry it.
There's an old prayer I keep coming back to — something like: lead me where you're taking me anyway; I'll go either bent or dragged, but I'm going either way, so I might as well go on my own feet. That's not resignation. That's just refusing to add a second injury — the injury of resentment — on top of whatever already happened.
Be ready. That's the whole ask. Not unbothered — ready.
Still on your side, whatever the road throws next —