Today I’m in the process of letting myself off the hook for “making” my closest ally feel bad by “bringing up bad feelings about the past.” Here’s what she missed.
I was devastated when she married her husband and I told her that, including why. That it wasn’t because she’d said yes to him and not me. I’m not wired that way. It was because someone I thought of as dear to me didn’t even tell me when her name changed. But it was water under the bridge and trying to tell her an important part of my process… including the fact that when I saw her husband through her eyes, it made my soul relax. She had someone to lean on in such a concrete way and it made me so happy rather than wondering if she was okay and not really feeling as if I could ask that question. I wasn’t focused on anything but wanting to know why she’d chosen to keep the information from me so I could stop thinking about it. I feel like I’d talk about an issue, she’d see me as trying to intentionally point out every flaw and failure she ever had, and I’d walk off like a kicked dog.
I was trying to tell her how much things had changed, that my perspective had grown as I did. That having a 50 foot view made me see how our patterns fit together and how far we’d come over time. I was trying to tell her how much I loved her and she thought I was trying to make her feel bad. I thought it would mean a lot to her to hear that her light erasing my dark wasn’t dependent on whether she changed her sexual orientation. I don’t have that much power, and wouldn’t use it if I did.
When I was telling her that she could lean on me, she took it as psychoanalysis, which to be fair it was. But it wasn’t pointing out flaws and failures, and I didn’t write the letter like that. I wrote it with as much empathy as I could muster, saying that I knew she’d been through a lot and I wanted to help. What does anyone who’s ever loved you want more for you than having less pain? I knew that I could help her have less pain by taking it on and hurting for her, breathing through it with her so that we both smiled on the exhale. I wish I had been able to express it in a way that she could hear it, because she is perfect in all her flaws and failures. Just perfect. I feel the way about her that people feel about babies… that no matter what their lives will hold, you know you’d die to protect them. There’s a place in all of us that is that vulnerable, the one that feels defenseless, and I gave her mine.
She just took away my piece of her. Let’s be clear, though. It was my fault entirely. She doesn’t do shit for no reason, but that doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to emotions about it.
I think she thinks I don’t know why she yanked my credentials…. That the victim part is in thinking I’ve never done anything wrong. Just because I don’t say I know I’m responsible doesn’t mean that I don’t know it. I’ve said it in as many ways as I possibly could, but that doesn’t mean she heard it. But the thing is, I sound like a victim because I’m only talking about my problem with you because I’m not reading your mind and looking for your problem with me. I can take a guess, but it will come across as psychoanalysis, or so I’ve been told. 😉
I show my empathy by telling people what I think of what they’re going through, and write with such care and attention most of the time. Sure, I have e-mails that just say “thanks,” but that’s not the majority. It happens more frequently now, because I’m scared of starting friendship that doesn’t have an anchor.
I’m processing all this to let go of the past, certainly, but also to understand what I didn’t want for next time. The only way I can do that is to understand what happened so I don’t do it again. If I make a mistake, the pendulum swings to the other extreme so that I don’t have another appearance of the same mistake.
It’s not about her anymore. It’s about knowing what to do if anything like this happens again. I don’t want to lean into the surreal. I want to touch you at least once in our friendship, even if it’s just you accidentally stepping on my heel. I need to prove that you are a solid mass as opposed to my conscience. 😉
It’s hard for people to accept that when they do something wrong, it doesn’t mean I’m taking love away. I’m not rejecting them. I’m trying to grow with them and not against them. If my beautiful girl is impressed by my enormous changes, it would stand to reason that we’d be better friends now than we were, because those impressive changes would have happened together. I am not offended that she feels goaded and provoked because I know by now that she sees my concerns as bombs because she’s not that deep. It’s not that she can’t. It’s that there’s a lot of “don’t want to” in “cain’t.” I know this because she’s done it.
I’m tired of working out all our problems and it only changing me.
And if that seems harsh, so be it. I can’t think of anything I’ve said about her in recent memory that she hasn’t taken as something I said to intentionally hurt her without ever looking at the ways I was asking her to take care of me, and asking her what she needed to feel loved as well. Therefore, when she said that e-mails making her feel bad were becoming the norm rather than the exception, I had no idea what she was talking about and she wouldn’t elaborate. If I don’t know what hurts, I can’t stop doing it.
We also have issues in both being fixer/pleasers, butt hurt when we’re actively trying to fix and the other isn’t receptive… not out of malice, but idiocy. I was dialed into my emotions, she was cut off. It wasn’t personal all the way around. She’s like that all the time, and so am I. But conflict with each other didn’t help. I keep asking myself why I required that of her, and let myself off the hook when I realized that it wasn’t me being demanding, it was me realizing that I couldn’t hold back my emotions. I couldn’t wall her off. I walked around in her inner landscape more than I should have, because she gave me a lot to think about that was interesting, and I gravitated toward interesting.
It made my asshole chew crackers when she said she’d marry Brene Brown (I would, too. That’s not the point. 😛 ). I can say that to you. It didn’t help hearing that Hannah Waddingham is hot as shit, either. That’s because me saying I felt the same way about her wigged her out, and she told me that, too. So, sexuality is nonbinary when there’s not a chance in hell it’s real. I am glad that she never in a million years said she’d marry me, even in jest. She definitely didn’t do it when she knew it was my landmine, but I mean early on, when neither of us could ever have done anything wrong. That’s because I would have hurt about it long after I died.
I just don’t feel let down. I don’t feel disappointed that I just wasn’t it for her. I feel like she has the right to be completely who she is, and to wish I could change her is the height of entitlement. I hate those people. What I did wish for is integration, and not necessarily physically, as in a cup of coffee together. Just that sense of integrating our ideas so that we were both up to speed on what the other thought.
I didn’t like being thought of as an asshole, and I didn’t like that she wouldn’t tell me why. I can’t hear that I’m making you feel bad when I’ve just sent you an e-mail saying that we’re both miracles and perfect, not together (but I can see it), but in all the things that we bring to the world.
I just have no idea what she was talking about, because I can have empathy for the way you feel and also no idea how to fix your problem with me if you don’t give me a little more detail. What did I say that made you feel bad, because I am not going to go through every line and have my stomach hurt trying to read your mind.
I also didn’t think it was fair that I looked at every feeling she had about me, seeing her as a spectrum, not a binary. She had me pegged as a dickhead unless I called her out and then I was very impressive for a few minutes.
It would always go back, though, because she hated being judged and couldn’t wrap her brain around the fact that I’m not judgmental about people. I’m judgmental about situations, but not in a way that’s trying to hurt people. I mean like an ACTUAL judge. Someone who listens to all of the facts and collates what they think and feel. Judgment is a way of making decisions. How do you differentiate between signal and noise? Some people perceive, some people judge. One is not more or less than the other, they’re different.
I judge people and situations to be perfect all the time. My judgment not only sees problems and analyzes them, it also makes me an incredible gift giver because since I’ve actually spent time muddling through our issues, I remember more of what you say and little things stick. Your favorite charities. Your job. Your interests. Your teams. Just anything that will tell you that when you get a gift from me, I’ve been paying attention. For instance, if your job requires that you be absolutely wired at all times, I’ll send you SBUX to maximize where you can spend the money. If it is Galentine’s Day, I will make you waffles, or send you a gift certificate to buy them. If I find out you’ve been a fan of Arsenal since you were a kid, I’ll kit you out over the next five years.
It’s a little bit like Sherlock Holmes deducing information, because through logic, he has a more complete data set than people think he does. I have a similar example to Holmes knowing Watson fought in Afghanistan. Not that extreme, of course. It’s just that I’ve picked up things over the years because I’m reading everything she’s not saying as well. This isn’t it, but a universal example would be someone being lactose intolerant because they’ve never said that, yet when you ask them what they want from a coffee shop, it’s always vegan.
The heuristic is that it’s more likely that someone is lactose intolerant than they just don’t like milk if they’ve never indicated they eat vegan food.
But I don’t tell her any of that crap to make her feel bad. I tell her that stuff because what I think is going to make her feel noticed and appreciated makes her feel terrible. If I can’t fix that, I need to move on, because it hurts too much to hurt her.
I let her go because I loved her, not because I was being a toddler.
If I’m the only one that makes her feel bad, my reactions don’t feel amazing, either. I’m just willing to tell you why so that more information means less conflict. Or it should, anyway.
Besides, fuck marrying Brene, because obviously if she hadn’t learned Microsoft Word from me, she wouldn’t be Brene Brown. I am directly responsible for all of her success and I won’t believe anything else. 😛
Stories That Are All True 