Our age group tends to overuse the word “toxic.” I constantly see it thrown around—especially on Twitter—and I’m reminded of people and situations in my life that I considered to be toxic at one time. When I would use the word toxic in reference to people in my life, I typically meant that they had hurt me repeatedly in some way; I think only people that were truly close to us at one point can mean enough to us to warrant the label of toxic. Still, there is a disconnect between how we use the word and what we actually mean. While my professor that keeps giving us hard exams makes me sad, he is not toxic, and I think most people would agree. My spin instructor brings repeated pain into my life, but she is not toxic.
Whenever I think about people I once considered toxic, my first thoughts always go to my senior year of high school: a year that I had to fight tooth and nail to get through. I had a friendship turn ugly and a relationship go up in flames. Every day, I felt betrayed by the people I cared about, embarrassed because I thought everybody knew my business and completely isolated as a result. At that stage of my life, I thought about these things constantly. It wasn’t until a while after graduation, leading up to freshman year of college, that I realized I had finally moved on. Before, I would constantly try to force myself to not think about these things that made me so upset. It was like a giant red button sitting in front of me with a “Do Not Press” sign; the more I tried to stop, the more these things circled in my brain. Looking back now, it wasn’t a result of my own willpower, forcing myself to forget, that helped me move on; but it was instead acknowledging and making peace with the fact that I too had played a part in these “toxic” relationships.
The way we describe past toxic relationships, particularly on social media, is as something that we escape from in which a toxic person in the scenario becomes an unredeemable villain. There are obviously serious cases where this absolutely applies, but most often it is merely how we filter our circumstances to make ourselves the victim, justifying our own wrong actions. This is especially hard to recognize when it feels like everyone is on your side. In high school, I received so much reassurance from my friends and sometimes even people I barely knew, who said I was the victim. With more maturity, you realize that everyone thinks they’re the victims of whatever circumstance and can probably make a valid case for thinking so. With the perspective of time, we are able to really place ourselves in the drama and realize the role we each had.
The older I get and the more people I meet, the more I realize what an important skill this is for people to have: to empathize with the people who you feel have hurt you and to take responsibility for the ways you have hurt them in return. There was a time when I kept hearing the saying, “the only thing in common between your messed up relationships is yourself” or something to that effect. This used to really bother me because I simply could not accept it as true, but we can all think of a time where we have been toxic friends. For each time we think of, there is probably another time that we don’t even realize! While this made me sad to acknowledge, none of us are perfect friends at all times, and some relationships are simply not meant to be. Now, before labeling someone as toxic, I can ask myself: are they really toxic, or did we both fail to empathize with one another and hurt each other as a result? Remember to take accountability for what you contribute to the circumstances that you are in. No matter the situation, it is never too late to be kind!
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