How to make bad things worse

"I see you're looking better than you were a couple of days ago. I wanted to stop by and tell you."

You should have stopped there.

I should have let you stop there. I was vulnerable and needed to talk to someone I trusted, not this perfect stranger to me. In the whole time I've known you, we've only had one conversation - a year ago.

"Thanks. I was struggling earlier this week, things have really been stressful. Thinking I'd be much better off if I just wasn't here."

Bad choice of words - she will think you mean something more than what you're saying. What I'm thinking of is stress leave, not "checking out." Oh what's the difference anyway. I just want her to go away. I wish she would just go away. I'm tired, I want to go home and get out of this awful place.

[condensed version of the repeated 10-minute tirade that followed] "Oh my God, Judy. You need help. You need to get help right now. I mean, call your doctor first thing Monday morning. I'm serious, get him to prescribe some antidepressants. I mean it! and I'm checking up on you on Monday to see if you've called him." 

Back-pedal. Let her know that is really not what you meant. AT ALL. 

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"Look, I would never commit suicide. Really. But I understand how some people can think that way."

Oops, I recognize that look. Oh crap, she's getting on her white horse and going to save the day. No-o, that's that LAST thing I want. All I want to do is get away from here, to go home, for her to shut up and leave me alone.

"No, that's way too close to the line. You've GOT to get some help. Talk to a therapist, are you seeing someone? you have to see someone." 

Oh great, now she's ordering me around!!! Why doesn't she just go away? Can't she see how stressed out she's making me? How can I get out of this? Maybe a little humour?

[By this time my head is in my hands as she rants on and on about how she was depressed and how she got help and that I need to do the same.] 

"So," I joke, "if I kill myself, THEN will you leave me alone?" 

This attempt at humour only adds fuel to the fire. Her reaction only shows how little she knows me. More and more she convinces herself that I'm in imminent danger and that she has to "save" me. Will she NEVER shut up?? 

[Finally I decide to be straight with her because beating around the bush isn't helping! I hate confrontation, but she's backing me into a corner. And when I am backed into a corner, I go on the offensive.] My voice raises; it is clipped and stern. "Listen. You are treating me like I'm two years old, like you have to be my savior or something. It's making me very uncomfortable, and I want you to stop this, and leave me alone."

She doesn't leave me alone. She goes on the defensive for a while, then turns around and attacks again, same pushy attitude, same ordering me around, same heavy-handed control stuff as before.

And she promises (sounds like she threatens) to check in with me on Monday. Which makes me not want to go there on Monday. Or any other day, if she was going to be there in my face all the time.  As a matter of fact, I hadn't started to consider suicide - even in jest (and it WAS only in jest) - until she started ranting about it. And now I was fantasizing about how many ways I could force her to shut her mouth!

You see ... how much better it might have been for her to say, "You look better today, you looked ill earlier in the week." and for me to say, "Thanks, I do feel a bit better," (which I DID until she started jumping down my throat) and left it at that. But no-o. My guard was down - I was tired - and discouraged - and vulnerable.

And what she actually said to me had the exact opposite effect than the one she wanted. Instead of giving me someone to talk to, she made me not want to talk to her about anything, because she'd only try to control my life and my thinking. Instead of making me feel like I was supported, she made me feel like I was being attacked, assaulted, and harassed. Instead of me knowing that I was cared for, I ended up feeling like now I was going to be her "special little project" and that I'd never be out from under her microscope. 

She may indeed have "meant well"... but her attitude and her actions were way over the top, and more of a hindrance to any help I might have been considering. I felt like someone who complained of a sniffle, suddenly being forced to go to the hospital and hooked up to an IV and a respirator.

Overkill. There's a reason they call it that. It's what makes bad things way worse. 

Saying it

I was talking last night with someone very dear to me - got a text from him, and then called him on the phone and spent nearly 2 hours with him.  He needed to talk and he needed someone to listen who wouldn't judge him.  As he poured out his heart and his frustrations about being condemned for being different from family members and the members of their social group, I realized that there are people in this world who will never quite understand that if someone believes or behaves differently from the accepted norm, it doesn't mean that person is a bad person.  

It means that he/she is different.  

And I also realized that such "poison people" believe what they want to believe because they have their minds made up already - and if we don't tell them what our truth is, they'll fill in the blanks themselves based on what motives they have previously attributed to us (and that's not going to change, ever).  And they'll get it wrong, every time. If we continue to not tell them, to not set the record straight, they'll assume that their version of events is correct - and spread their perception of us far and wide.  (Um ... I think that's called "backbiting."  Maybe even "slander.")

I've been guilty of spreading such poison in my life ... and of late, I've been guilty of not setting the record straight with those in my life who have filled in the blanks and have spread their poison so far and wide that I am "persona non grata" (person without a status) in some places (places, I might add, where I no longer wish to go - because they are there.) 

Judged.  Condemned.  Executed.  Just for speaking the truth.  Just for trying to help someone who might want to be helped.  Yes, I'm talking about what I tried to do when I wrote and published Get Unwrapped! ... and the people of whom I am speaking are the very people who should have supported me - but never have.  I've mentioned their vitriolic reaction before on this blog, earlier this month.

I used to care what those people thought of me.  I used to.  Then I saw them - really SAW them for the first time, without the rose-colored glasses they thrust upon me from my birth - SAW them treat the man I was talking to last night like the scum of the earth just because ... well it doesn't matter about the because. Let's just say he isn't a 'clone' of them.

Thank God.

The whole experience showed me that I didn't want to continue subjecting myself or my husband or children to that kind of self-righteous, hypocritical garbage any more. So I withdrew from hanging around with them.  Months ago.

What a relief that was.  For me, that is. 

They were baffled by my refusal to keep in contact.   So, they filled in the blanks about me, too. (I suspect that this activity began even before I broke contact.)  

Their answers/guesses haven't been very pretty, and (naturally, to make them appear saintly and me, villainous) they have painted me in the worst possible light.  I know they're 'projecting' - a psychological term that means to attribute to others a motive that is actually hidden in one's self.  In other words, they say I'm vindictive because they are vindictive; it's what they do without even realizing it.  Yet they don't want to admit that they're vindictive - so they accuse me of it.  It's how they get to sleep at night. 

I've decided to give them the answers that should have gone into those blanks they filled in. Of course they'll continue to believe what they want to believe, just like always - and it will change nothing in how they behave toward me - or toward the man I spoke with last evening.  But the right answers will be out there.  I'll have spoken up.  I'll have said it.

"Saying it" has always been taboo.  We didn't talk about the elephant in the room even if he WAS standing on our toes.  It just wasn't done!  And if someone committed the cardinal sin of even saying that there WAS an elephant (never mind in the room!) that person would be taken out and (emotionally) executed: crucified, so to speak - a slow, sadistic, and painful death in front of as many people as possible. And the executioners would feel perfectly justified in their actions - because for them, the illusion of perfection is preferable to the reality of brokenness, after all. ("What would people think?" prevents so many from getting the help they so desperately need.)  When I wrote my book, I exposed the elephant. They couldn't get past the fact that I had the gall to do that, so as to see the wonderful reality and healing that came of my brokenness. And so, they have been nailing me to the cross of their self-righteousness.

So if I'm going to be condemned to such a fate anyway - it might as well be for the right reasons.