Writing off your losses
There’s an expression: “to throw good money after bad.” It means to continue to invest — either financially or in a less tangible sense — in something that was an unwise idea in the first place.
Every so often, about once a year on average lately, I’ve had to come face-to-face with the concept of throwing good money after bad, on a personal level. It happened to me a few days ago.
I accepted about myself, when I was in my early 20s, that there are certain people in this world that I’ll just never be friends with. Oh, we can be acquaintances. But actual friends, with trust and honesty and stuff? No. There are certain people with whom I just can’t ever have that, no matter what qualities they might possess that would tempt me into trying.
Okay, that’s a little bit of an understatement. The truth is, the overwhelming majority of people I can never be friends with. People I can actually enter into, achieve and sustain a true friendship with are exceedingly rare. One in a thousand, maybe? Less? If you add up all the people I’ve ever known in my life and divide by the number of people I’m actually friends with now — two — that makes the average pretty damn small.
But here’s the thing: I can’t really tell who I can and who I can’t be friends with just by looking. Sometimes I’ll get an inkling, maybe, but that inkling is almost always wrong.
So I’m left with two choices. Either I can give up on having friends period, end of paragraph. Or I can keep trying, failing most of the time, and hoping to get lucky.
The rational part of me says — screams — to give up. Just stop trying. Ironically, it’s probably all the damn trying that turns most of my friendships into disasters anyway. So screw it. Just give up on the idea of making new friends, and learn to live life as it is, not as I wish it could be.
But for many of the same reasons that I can’t be friends with just anybody, I also can’t seem to let go of wanting to have friends. It’s a damnation fit for one of the Greek gods. One of the vengeful ones, one of the ones with absolutely no sense of proportion. Who was it who fucked with Cassandra? Wasn’t it Apollo? Apollo had the hots for her, so he gave her the power to see the future. But when she cold-shouldered him, he cursed her never to be believed. That’s the kind of sick, twisted idea of justice we’re talking about here. Oh, you want desperately to have friends, and to give of yourself totally and without reservation. But because you annoyed me briefly, I’m going to curse you so that none of your attempts at friendship will ever succeed. That’s the Olympian way, .
So anyway, this is all back-story. Me want friends, but me no make friends good. Me screw up, me end up disliked. Sob sob. Whatever.
The point of my little act of authorial self-indulgence tonight is this: If I can’t have friends, and I can’t just give up on friendship, then can’t I at least — please — learn better to recognize the point at which I should stop throwing good money after bad?
It happens to me every time, man. Things go very well for a while. But then they turn sour, and then they suck. And eventually I reach a point where I just have to say “This isn’t going to work, give up on this, try to forget this and move on.” But I always seem to do it about a month after I should have done it in the first place.
It’s not like I pick bad people to try to be friends with. I’m really kind of a snob when it comes to this sort of thing; I think I pick great people to try to be friends with. I just can’t, for reasons that are totally beyond my control but that I take complete responsibility for, be friends. Period. It’s my fault, you know? And I try and I try, but eventually there comes a point beyond which trying just makes it worse, and it’s time to stop. All efforts have failed, all alternatives have been exhausted, pull the plug, throw in the towel, just fucking give up already.
And then I realize I should have done it weeks ago. Then I realize that the point-of-no-return is way, way off in the rear-view, and I’ve been speeding along ever since I passed it with the windows down and the radio on, singing like an idiot at the top of my lungs like I’m actually going somewhere.
But I’m not. I’m just wasting gas. And the longer I drive, the farther I’ll be from home, and the longer, and lonelier, my trip back will be.
So fine. I can’t have friends. And I can’t stop wanting to have friends. Why can’t I at least get better — even just a little better — at realizing when it’s time to give up?