“If your absence doesn’t affect them, your presence never mattered.”

Credited by Dido Stargaze

Like many quotes each one will affect someone a different way. That’s what I love about quotes, it can go either way. This however hits home for me.

I always try and help my friends to the best of my ability. I will give them the very clothes off my back if they need it. I even allow my friends to live with me until they are able to get back on their feet.

The thing that hurts the most is when you do that for someone and then they go out to get their own place you no longer hear from them again.

It makes you feel like you were being used and now you’re not useful to them anymore. That you were only a steppingstone beneath their feet.

It goes to show how important your “friendship” was to them. Even though it stings to have this done to you, it gives you a lesson for the next time they ask for something.

This gets you to think as to what you should do. If that opportunity ever comes around again. Do you help them, then they leave you, until they need you again? or do you just say no, I can’t help you this time?

So now that I have learned my lesson. I used to give people so many chances. Hoping they would change. I also didn’t want to lose a friend either, but it didn’t dawn on me that I was being used at the time. I thought of it as them ‘being down on their luck.’

Now sure I’ll help you but if I don’t hear from you for months or years, then no. I am realizing that I am no one’s steppingstone and I will not be placed on the back burner until you’ll need me again.

So, from now on, I will not plead endlessly to get attention from them. If they don’t answer to my call or text within months, even though you can see that they have read it, then I’ll pay the same respect they have given me.

My promise to myself is that I will not dwell on someone who doesn’t want to be around me. So, if my absence doesn’t matter to them neither will their absence matter to me.

I will wish you well and good luck in life. Because you lost a good lifelong friend who would do anything for you.

Would that make me bitter or am I doing the right thing?

Let me know in the comments below of your thoughts.