Nowadays, it starts out this way: “I am upset.”
Then it goes, “Tell me why.”
If I have enough even-ness and expression-ful, I might even say, “I am not happy with the way things are with us. It hurts.”
But more often than not, it comes off as “I am not happy” and the unspoken words are “…with our friendship”.
I would be coerced into answering what that means, because everyone doesn’t understand the vagueness of the word. I wouldn’t understand it either if I heard it. Some insightful people would then say, “Tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll fix it.” Others would simply say, “Just tell me.”
Maybe this when I start crying. Tearing. In my head, I am going through why something said made me upset. I am going through whether it’s the person, whether it’s the situation, or whether it triggers something inside me.
Sometimes I can list out the things: maybe it was when you did this and that. Maybe it’s when that happened. Maybe it’s because of how you reacted when I said something.
Usually the other person gets defensive. Of course, they would. They don’t like being told that they did a bad thing. Nobody wants to be a bad person. What if I said that “but you would react like you did something wrong and you would defend it, so how can I tell you if you defending it won’t help at all”. I wonder if I said that. What if I said, “all I really want is for you to hear me”.
The latter is nearly impossible for most people. They hear only that I don’t like what they did and they try to force me to hear what they’re saying. To explain why they reacted a certain way.
And that makes me more upset. Usually forcing me to wallow more in sadness and the pain is so great that I declare that I can’t deal with the pain anymore and that we can’t continue the relationship.
Spectacularly messy.
But the amazing thing about this is that it’s just that. It’s not something that everybody has a handle on. What’s interesting is that…will it count against future success? Not as a reputation, because loose connections won’t ever know. They cannot know. Until they experience it themselves.
Skeletons in closet? It might seem like it to me. But it can’t count against me in my background check. Sometimes that’s all that matters. It ain’t a crime.