The kind that can keep you up at night. You wake up thinking about something that someone said to you or did to you once. Ancient history. And you can't let it go because it has you by the limbic system.
I know I'm letting that take hold of me, but I can't shake it.
The question that comes up for me is whether people just don't know what they are doing, or do they know perfectly well?
The patronizing "Up in the Air" talk when they tell you you're being "let go." The punishing put down to end a relationship (business not personal) when if they had communicated more effectively earlier, things could easily have worked out differently. It feels intentional, but I just don't know.
I try to look at this to see if there are times I have done something like it to someone. I can remember some instances--not many, fortunately--and I don't think I set out to hurt the other person. Nor was I protecting myself in some way. It was just careless and thoughtless. What I don't think I ever did was to pretend that it didn't happen when I see the person again, and I have had that done to me. That really grates,
What's mine? What's theirs?
I think of the instance where the person who termed me the week before, was in a meeting I was managing during my last week, and beckoned me across the room. Literally beckoned, as in hand turned up, index finger beckoning. Come here, little one, and be obsequious and servile about it if you please. Not much choice about how to respond to that in front of a room full of people. That was intentional.
Obviously it still hooks me. I can say to myself that I have a choice about that, but it doesn't take. It doesn't register in a way that I can let it go. There's no finishing this business, and I'm not going to get even (as in "Don't get mad. Get even.").
I'm writing this at an odd hour because, you might have guessed, I cannot sleep. As if writing will expiate the demon.
Who knows. Maybe it will. I can let this one sit for a few days unpublished and think about it.
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