To The Wolves

I've written this blog post with a particular group of people in mind: humans with lesser morals about keeping secrets and staying out of other people's business.

Just today a really close and dear friend of mine, who has been working hard to get her life back together after a slightly abusive relationship and some hardships with previous roommates, received a letter from her current landlord describing that she would be kicked out in SEVEN days because 'one of her neighbours' has alleged that she has pets and alerted the landlord to this. My friend has two kitttens, she lives in a one bedroom place so I think it's good for her to have those pets in her life. However some nosey person has entered her backyard and taken photographic proof of the kittens and passed this information on.

An action like this has terrible consequences for my friend, and for the lives of the kittens. It makes me wonder how I am supposed to (as a third party to this) help my friend through this. It is possible to help her search for a new place that allows pets indoors, but she only has one week. I can't help but feel so much anger towards the person who thought they would try and get on the good side of the landlord by dobbing in another tennant. I wonder if this person is truly aware of what those pictures have done. My friend has passed every inspection despite having the pets, and no one seemed affected until now.

Last year my family and I had group counselling - I promise this is relevant. We were all at a point where we felt we couldn't 'deal' with each other in a positive way, and every discussion anyone had would usually result in some sort of argument. It took us more than 6 months of fortnightly sessions at our home to work through the issues and make useful changes to ourselves to benefit the family unit.

One of the most powerful analogies that the psychologist used to help us visualise what was going on was a venn diagram. He drew four circles (my father, my mother, myself, and my sister) and they all overlapped with each other. As you can imagine, it was a very complex structure - we were all befuddled by the complexity of it! The venn diagram represented the relationships between everyone in the family. The idea was to show us that the space created by the overlapping of two circles was our neutral grounds (or the buffer), where each person could come to and feel equal. The issue our family was having, was that too frequently one of us would overlook the neutral zone, and head straight for the other person's circle. We were trying to control something that wasn't ours to control.

To put it another way: That circle was our garden, the backyard to our house. Imagine it is Autumn, and there are trees in everyone's gardens losing leaves. Well the leaves are the situations that we as humans deal with. We rake those leaves up ie. we deal with the issues, and then we don't know where to put the aftermath. So we throw it over the fence. Into someone else's space. We are thereby increasing the amount of leaves that our 'neighbour' has to rake up, and we are basically influencing their garden. Over the fence. Where we aren't supposed to have any say at all.


More often than not, the 'leaves' we throw over the fence are different to the leaves falling off someone Else's tree. The 'neighbour' notices the difference, but suddenly they are forced to deal with the extra load, and the person who has dumped them has little or no concern for the future of the leaves. As far as they are concerned, they are in full control, and only their personal leaf free space matters. This is exactly like the situation my friend is going through right now.

The immediate future of my good friend is in jeopardy because someone tried to control what was over the other person's side of the fence, instead of staying out of it and letting whatever may happen between the landlord and my friend in the future, happen naturally, and over a longer period of time. I don't understand why people feel the need to slip themselves into situations that belong to other people. If they aren't going to have any regard for the outcome or for the life of the person they are influencing with their blind choices, then they shouldn't be interjecting themselves into the business of others. It's as simple as that.