None of us is perfect.  We strive to embody the values we profess.  I am flawed.  I am so very far from perfect.  I’m ok with that.  It’s not for not trying!

But as I watch with outward horror at the amazing lengths of inward denial that a person will go through — and that invariably pride, ego, protection of our ‘self’ wins over the morals and ethics that I hold most dearly.  Well, I question my friendship.  I simply cannot stand by and watch it all unravel.  I speak my mind.  I always have.  It certainly doesn’t win me friends.  I would rather be honest and take the higher road than to take the easier path that isn’t the more public defeat.  It is far better, IMHO to say, ‘I failed’, and deal with it, than to continue a path of destruction that will ultimately sacrifice home, security, future… what could be more important than those things?

Laura, my truest, dearest friend has been watching from the sidelines through this entire unfolding, and has told me that she likes my candor — because she knows I won’t just pay ‘lip service’ to any situation that I am put into.  I like that she knows me so well.  She knows that I will jump in with my whole being, grab you by the shoulders and shake you verbally with my words — if only to try and break through!!!  I am not the path of least resistance.  I care too much to just sit back and watch you be your own undoing.  Friendship is not a spectator sport.

My truth may not be your truth.  That’s ok – I cannot know everything.  Certainly not when you conceal it all so skillfully.  I thought it was just that you were overwhelmed.  That you were depressed.  But I see more clearly that you engage only when you have to.  This ‘way of life’ is how you operate.  It is completely foreign to me.  I would no more be able to live my life that way than to call myself a blonde and profess it true because all my children have light hair.  Although that kind of coverup is far less hurtful than what you are doing.  It doesn’t affect other people.  It doesn’t affect my family’s security and well-being.

I am not a historian, by any means.  And surely using The Tudors as an example will reflect that!  (I know Liz is cringeing).  Ok, So if I don’t look at it for historical accuracy, but by what the actors are showing the characters to be working through, you see in Queen Katherine and Sir Thomas More that the higher standards you possess, the more of a hypocrite you will inevitably be and it leads not to a happy future.

So in some ways, hypocrisy reinforces, rather than undermines, one’s beliefs.

I don’t want to be negative.  I don’t want to seem cold.  I have given all I can give and you don’t take any of it in.  You are teflon, and nothing sticks.

So I’m left with one truth to share:  how you behave cannot alter the truth.  It is the truth and no matter how you dance around it, move and shift and shake it all up as if it were in a snowglobe – it does NOT alter the truth.

At some point you will have to deal with it.  I want you to be OK.  But I cannot simply stand on the sidelines.  I have to leave the field.