Chapter 4 Page 29
Happy holidays, all! Thanks for the wait on this one–been busy with some (luckily very cool) job stuff, but my personal time was a little sapped.
Brainchild
by Suzanne Geary
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©2014-2023 Suzanne Geary Powered by WordPress with ComicPress
Hey, happy holidays!
It’s good if you’ve been busy with nice work stuff
Btw Allison needs this nap (who doesn’t, really)
I have, far too often, been the clueless nincompoop when people told me they needed some time to themselves and didn’t want to talk about whatever-it-was.
See, I would believe them. And leave them alone. And have absolutely no idea what was going on when they were mad at me the next day.
When someone finally explained to me what had been going wrong, I was practically dumbfounded. I spent weeks thinking back about all the things people “hadn’t wanted to talk about” and realizing that quite a lot of them were things that would have made both of us happier, or possibly even led to a life together, if I’d responded correctly.
As it happens though, I wound up marrying the one who explained it to me a few years later – and can’t say anything against the circumstances that had me still available when she came along, because wow, she’s awesome. But I still kick myself for cluelessness, because I did a whole lot of interpersonal damage that way. Without even intending to. Without even realizing it.
We live. We make mistakes. And sometimes some of us learn from our mistakes. It’s not very reliable but sometimes we do.
And then there’s me, who tends to mean it when I say that I don’t want to talk about it
Although, that’s probably more related to the fact that I don’t have many people with whom I actually want to talk about it
I’m guessing that when you say, and mean, that you don’t want to talk about something, the circumstances are different. I’m betting you don’t say it to someone whose room you’ve just requested permission to enter specifically because you want to be around them, and followed up with a complaint about a large intractable problem the way Allison just did.
This was behavior I didn’t understand in high school and college. When I didn’t want to talk about something I had a strong desire to be alone, and would never have sought out company. I didn’t get why anybody would.
And of course the answer is that they DO want to talk about it, they just don’t want to SAY they want to talk about it, because vulnerability, because selfconsciousness, because imposition on a friend, etc etc etc… All these reasons that don’t affect our behavior as much as they affect our words.
If they DID want to talk about it, why’d they say they didn’t? To hell with them.
Because saying “I don’t want to talk about it” can protect you from sharing personal information with people whom you’re not comfortable with and it serves to test wether someone has genuine interest in your well-being.
Of course this is flawed logic, but so is being human in general and it can work just like this.