We all go through life meeting various people and learning how to handle the varying degrees ofpersonalitythat are presented to us. Some of the people whom we understand and can identify with to a certain extent become our friends and acquaintances.
While the others whom we cannot relate to or have a serious clash of personalities with become our enemies. The degree and extent of how we are enemy’s to a person will solely depend upon how we choose to handle our friction with that person.
We can choose to ignore the person and try to avoid all contact with that person in order to avoid trouble. But, there are times in our lives when we simply cannot avoid those people or that person because the circle we move in is so small that we have no choice but to mingle and work with the person. This particular scenario is most evident during our growing up and maturing years in school.
The school bully is the most typical enemy that an adolescent or teenager can have. An enemy can come in any shape, form, size, and gender, so how we deal with that person depends upon the foundation of the relationship with that person.
For starters, I have to point out that nobody ever sets out to meet people thinking of whom will be an enemy at the end of the day. A person sets out looking for friends and sometimes, it is those friends who eventually turn into an enemy.
That is what happened to me and the person who has become my enemy. We actually grew up a few houses from each other and were friends during our earlychildhood. We spent our childhood as friends and playmates, even sleeping over when it was possible to do so. But one day, things changed between us. The parents of my friend divorced and my friend had a really hard time coping with the situation.
Over time, I saw that my friend was slowly morphing into my enemy and I was helpless to do anything about it. The more I tried to help, the angrier the person got until it got to the point that I was told to back off any stay out of this person’s personal business. After that, this person chose to go with some of the kids in the town who were deemed “ the wrong crowd”. It was at this point where my friend turned into my enemy.
Over time, our physical characteristics changed just as this persons unexplained hatred towards me seemed to grow with every passing day. My enemy was now a person a full head taller than me, of a thinner build than I am, but with 4 times my body strength.
I really did not understand what I had done wrong for this person to hate me so much that I had been turned into a virtual bully target every single day at school. The anger only seemed to reach a feverish pitch every time there was a parent-child activity in school where I participated on my parents nudging because it was a good social activity for all of us.
The day after the activity was always the hardest part for me at school because this person seemed to be waiting with so much pent up anger that was just waiting to be released, usually upon me. I could not understand why this person was like this when we were so close before. It was only after careful analysis of the situation that I narrowed down the reason for the anger to envy and jealousy.
This person had resented that my parents were not broken up and that we were still a happyfamilywhile theirs had fallen apart. The envy of having both parents there for me when I needed them was too much for this person to see so the only solution was to act upon the anger.
I viewed the person as my enemy because of the hurt being inflicted upon me mentally, emotionally, and at times physically, while this person saw me as an enemy because I had what was now lost to him, a family unit.
Such a problem was beyond my power to solve and so I had to accept the fact that my friend was gone and in his place was this person whom I no longer knew nor understood. Nothing was left of our originalfriendship, instead, what we had now was just bad blood and my hope that eventually, my enemy would once again be my friend.
