Your old friends may not mesh with the awakened you.
I’ve butted heads with friends lately. It’s still happening. The last of my old friends seem to be coming up incompatible with me. As soon as I realized who I really am and I set boundaries, I found myself speaking up without fear. I tell people they’re overstepping my boundaries and that I am not okay with it. Even old friends. I have realized that there is something even more important and precious to me than friendship — authenticity.
In the summer of 2020, I unfriended or blocked more people on Facebook than I ever had in the entire ten years I’d been on the platform. That’s when it was starting. I was not allowing myself to tolerate insults, attacks, or constant heckling on my page for the first time ever. I found some of my courage and my self-esteem — but not all. I wasn’t truly expressing my authentic self yet.
I was actually allowing the anger to build up inside me because I felt like my true expression would make people walk away from me.
I had been suddenly awakened to a new reality, one that was highly spiritual, and the people I had known and loved until then weren’t my people anymore. They’re not bad people. They just speak in a way that doesn’t work for me. The topics of conversation, the regular and accepted anxieties, and the ways some of them attacked others who didn’t agree with them just didn’t align with my values anymore.
I used to think that stuff was fun.
Not anymore. It seemed very obviously fear-based and ego-driven, and I didn’t like it anymore.
But, apparently, it didn’t end back then. Friends slowly trickled out, starting with people who I hadn’t seen in years, and moving through to some of my closest peeps. Spiritual awakening required me to face the people who didn’t help me in my journey anymore. That was phase one.
Then, I went through a phase of bolstering my authentic self. I learned to use my voice without fear and communicate what was in my heart, and this caused relationship friction.
I just can’t sacrifice my sense of self-esteem and my values anymore in the name of friendship. Because, in the end, who wants friends who force you to water down your authentic personality? And on the other side, who wants a friend who is weak and acquiesces to your needs, even when it’s against their values? It’s mutually beneficial to part ways.
You will outgrow friendships. It’s okay to walk away. Don’t keep someone around for old time’s sake — let them fade out of your life if they’re making you uncomfortable.
You’ll find that once you purge the toxicity from your life, and let go of the things and people who were making you suppress your authenticity, then you suddenly begin attracting a new group of people. You’ll be fine.
When you have an awakening, you understand suddenly that you are a soul that has accumulated certain karma along your journey. You’ve learned to accept people into your life who may not treat you with respect all the time. Your behavior and karmic energy attract certain people, and you hadn’t noticed all this time. You hadn’t noticed the effect that your own energy has had on the events of your life.
You may have been putting energy out into the world that was creating disastrous outcomes for you. And the people who came with those events also follow you around. Throughout your life, new people arrived sometimes who came to you because they were attracted by your energy, and maybe that energy wasn’t coming from a place of self-love.
Those people liked you the way you were. They won’t like the new you. The new you has boundaries. They won’t understand.
Suddenly, you are fresh and new. You wake up to reality. It’s common in an awakening to realize that you need to find new friends.
It’s also common that your old friends, though they’ve accompanied you on this journey for a long time, need to fade away. They’re holding you back.
My message is simple. Don’t cling to things that aren’t serving you. That includes people. Maybe some people were helping you along this journey, but now they aren’t. Just because you don’t want to surround yourself with their energy anymore doesn’t mean you don’t like them. It doesn’t mean they’re bad people. But as energy goes, you’ll repel what doesn’t match anymore, and attract what does match.
You’ll get new friends. I know I did.
