Bleeding Heart.

It is a habit of mine to offer my condolences and services to those whom I probably shouldn't. I invest emotions into people that take advantage of my naive sense of responsibility for humanity. At least four times a week, generally, I'm awoken in the middle of the night by a frantic phone call from a drama-ridden soul on the other end. I therefore spend the next x amount of time comforting them and listening to their woes and worries. I don't mind it, necessarily. I know it's just my nature to take on other peoples' burdens. It's just part of my character make up to put myself in front of fiasco train in a vain attempt to stop them, even if they were never my problem to begin with. I just care about people, maybe to a fault. I realize that this probably makes me codependent. But it's not that I thrive off of others that lead lives of desperation, I also care about the people who leave respectively dull or contended lives, also. It's just the people who tend to have struggle and wear and tear in their lives are attracted to me for the sole reason that I'm one of the few people who will listen. My biggest problem, though, is that I find myself at a loss for two-way friendships. Not that I have no friends that give back, it's that the ones who are always taking require so much more attention, that I rarely have time for the people in my life that actually give me comfort. So I constantly find myself drained of everything. Also, like now, I find myself caught between two conflicts. I dislike taking sides, but that isn't always possible. For example, right now I'm caught between a brother and a sister, both of whom I've known since they were very little and I consider family to myself. I care both of them a lot but there was no way to help them without hurting someone, so I had to be the bad guy. I can't go into detail concerning this subject, but basically to keep them both safe I had to make one of them hate me. And they never want to speak to me again, and called me many names that very nearly brought me to tears. And they had good reason to be mad, but I hope and pray that one day they'll understand the decision that I made and forgive me. I kept quiet and just let them yell at me, and the whole time I just realized that if I ever want children this may be the mayhem I will probably have to face on multiple occasions. It's part of being a guardian rather than a friend. The difference is the guardian does what is right, not necessarily what is easy. I fervently hope that one day we become close again, but she will probably never trust me the way she has these last 12 years I've known her. Which is very sad, but I don't regret it, because in my heart I know I did the right thing. But sometimes I wonder if that's enough.