Aesop
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Aesop

"Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own."

When Friendship Is One-Sided: Letting Go of Someone Who Was Never Really There
https://tinybuddha.com/blog/when-friendship-is-one-sided-letting-go-of-someone-who-was-never-really-there/

“Finally, I realized that I was never asking too much. I was just asking the wrong person.” ~Unknown
Friendship should nourish the soul. And in my life, for the most part, it has. I have a small, longstanding circle of friends steeped in a long-shared history. We’re basically a real-life, thirty-five-year-long John Hughes film.
However, every now and then, a hornet in disguise has buzzed into my life and stung.
He was one of them. A bad sting.
Love Bombing
Right off the bat, knowing him felt amazing.
I was still reeling from the aftereffects of living with an abusive (https://tinybuddha.com/hub/love-relationships/abuse/)…

When the Body Freezes: On Love and Grief in Midlife
https://tinybuddha.com/blog/when-the-body-freezes-on-love-and-grief-in-midlife/

“I was constantly seeking a balance between mourning what’s already been lost, making space for the time and moments we still had left, and making sense of this complicated process that felt like my heart was split between two contrasting realities: hope and heartbreak.” ~Liz Newman
There is a quiet heaviness that begins to settle into many of us in midlife (https://tinybuddha.com/blog/its-never-too-late-to-change-how-to-reinvent-yourself-in-midlife/).
It doesn’t announce itself with drama. It slips in through unanswered emails from an aging parent, through half-slept nights spent wondering how we will ever afford live-in care, or whether that one fall they had was the beginning …