So instead of Jpegs and tiffs, I lie in bed, mulling.
I woke this morning so tired, that I walked sideways into the wall and bashed my face. Last day of term and so I looked for the cards I had written to the teachers. I looked in the fridge. It didn't bode well for the day ahead.
In fact, in the short period that I could stay awake, I managed to rewrite one press release to appear as if it had been specifically written for tall people, for male people and for people that had a blank canvas. I am still waiting for the clients response on my copy line for the gay market. Pretty nifty work I thought, until the whole thing was scuppered by intermittent internet. Technology was never my forte, that was always the art of the tenuous link.
I had a call from my work guru today. A formidable business woman with the softest heart, she called to say that she had won another pitch. She hadn't really expected to since the woman she was pitching to, was intimidating. Apparently, she stares directly at you, completely expressionless. It turns out that this is not intimidation but the result of too much Botox. She has no expression because her face is frozen.
Having recovered from the hysterics I found myself with, it got me thinking. The way we present to others is easily misconstrued and all too frequently we are unaware of the impact on others. A bit like the business meeting I attended in which I realised that my silence was taken for quiet authority and made me the focus of the answers. The other person could have no idea that I was silent simply because I had absolutely nothing to say.
So in my skill of the tenuous link, it got me mulling on parts of the conversation that took place
last night. We all go through life making an impact, good or bad on others and likewise, people make an impact on you. Acknowledging that for what ever reason, someone else see's something in you that was good, should never be a hard thing, it should never be something that you recoil from. If you do, there is something that has gone very wrong.
One of the things that I have enjoyed most about being single, is the freedom of thought and of choice, unhindered by misplaced guilt. Next month I am taking the children camping. A trip with friends and with my ex-blind date and his children. This man is an important part of my life. I met him, liked him but do not want a relationship with him. We are adults, we like each other, care about each other and I feel priveledged to have him in my life.
What I could never do is dismiss him as a person simply because his feelings for me did not match mine for him. On a completely superficial level, I feel honoured that he cares and feel equally priveledged that anyone shoud care, even if the feelings were not reciprocated.
So this is the perplexity. If I tell someone that I care, or cared about them - it would be reasonable to assume that they should not have some form of panic attack. It doesn't make sense. If I told He who cannot be mentioned' that I cared about him, it would be reasonable to expect him to panic - since he would not be sure of my motives and deep down he would know that the world must be about to end. However, if I told him that I had cared about him, even he would get that it means nothing more than the statement it is. And he gets very little.
I knew someone once that had been abused as a child. In fact, 'he should not be mentioned' had an extremely emotionally abusive childhood and the effect of that is palpable in the behaviour he has as an adult. The thing about the person I knew, is that they thought they are so good at hiding it. They weren't. I always thought that the saddest thing about this person was that the one thing they craved most was love. It was also the one thing that terrified.
It didn't matter who tried, they were always pushed away. Abusive childhoods come in all shapes and sizes and the scars, if you allow - it can define your entire life. This friend was sexually abused. She could do the relationship, until the sex. This is the point she was numb, the point she recoiled and this is the point that the relationship was on it's way out. Only it was never her, always another reason and always about the other person. It was never the reality, never that she had an issue with intimacy. One that was not her fault, but in not facing it - she was allowing to control her life.
The hardest thing about caring, the trickiest task as a friend, is in allowing them the freedom to think that they are just fine. When you really do care, you have to go along with the pretence, because sometimes people simply cannot face the past.
And until they do, there is no future.
For the rest of us mere mortals, when someone saw something in you that they considered good, don't acknowledge that by being unkind. That, is an issue
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