Hiding in the public eye

I’ve been a blogger for a few years now, but felt a need to find a new place – somewhere where I can be totally anonymous, so that I can really say whatever comes to mind.

Blogging kind of crept up on me, it wasn’t something I planned, it just happened naturally when a friend invited me to a social networking site (no, not that one) where I found myself with free web space and, seeing as writing is something I’d always done, I happily started putting my ramblings onto the screen instead of paper.

And, of course, I invited friends and family to come read my blog. And I made new friends online. And it was great – and in many ways it still is great, but…

Now and again there’s something I feel like posting and I think: what will so-and-so say? what will that person feel? I don’t know if this one could handle reading this… Not to mention those times when I go through unbelievable hoops in trying to make sure that I don’t identify the person I’m writing about, because that person might read it, or because one of their friends might…

Too complicated.

Hence this new abode – a hiding place in the very public arena called the internet.

But on the other hand…

The other day I used this blog to weep for a lost friendship, a friendship which was very precious to me but which seems to have just fizzled out. Maybe we didn’t water it enough.

But then I looked again at the recent Christmas card from my friend S, who takes the time to write at great length about everything that’s going on in her life, and also comments on what I’ve told her about what’s going on with me – we don’t communicate often, she leads a busy life, but once in a while there’ll be a card or an email and these communications are for real, they’re not the superficial stuff you get from some people. This card reminds me that I am blessed with some very real, precious friends, and it would probably be better for me to focus on that rather than crying over the ones I’ve lost.

S’s friendship is particularly precious to me because it’s a friendship I had lost, but she had enough grace to forgive me and return to being my friend – not just on the surface but for real. We had hurt each other quite a lot at one stage, and for some time we weren’t speaking, but somehow – I don’t even remember now how and when, though I know it was her initiative – we resumed the friendship, and it’s wonderful.

And then there’s J, whom I got to know just before leaving London about a decade ago and we have a very deep and real friendship, maintained by email plus a phone call now and again (the phone calls tend to be long – once we get going we have a lot to say).

There is the more recent friendship with C, whom I met on the counselling course and we just clicked, and we email or exchange private Facebook messages – phone calls are tricky as she’s busy in the afternoons once the kids are home from school, and I’m not a morning person. So we write. (There are others from the course I’ve stayed in touch with, but on a more superficial level – still nice, still valuable, but not the same.)

There are a few people locally with whom I feel I have a real connection, and that’s special because we can do face to face interaction, and non-virtual hugs.

There are a few very precious online friendships, people I’ve only met online but we connect on a very deep level and I get wonderful support from them when I’m feeling low – it’s especially helpful at low times because when I’m down I find it extremely difficult to phone people (or to answer the phone if it rings) but I have no problem typing through tears, and with these friends being in different countries/different time zones, I’m quite likely to get a response when I need it.

And there are a whole load of people who like me, people who may not get hugely deep but then we can’t all go deep with everyone all the time – there is value in those less deep connections, which still provide some warm insulation against the cold dark world out there.

And of course there’s my husband, who is not just a husband but a friend too, who likes me even though he knows me really well…

There is E, who is a very very precious friend from a totally unexpected direction.

There are others who don’t spring to mind just now.

And the best is that God loves me and likes me and with him there’s no chance it will ever just fizzle out – unless I let it.

I am not alone in this world, even though it sometimes feels like it.

Typing through tears

ok, I’ve been trying to ignore it and get on with things but I’m tired of pretending to be strong and looking like I don’t care, I’ve got to let it out.

it’s about a friend, let’s call her M. let me tell you the whole story.

we first met in 1995, when we were both on the same course at university – thirty-somethings doing university studies in the evening after work (Birkbeck College, London) – and we were assigned to the same small group seminar for one of the subjects.

M was the one who took the initiative and invited me to her home. We became friends. Close friends. Very possibly helped by us both being foreigners in London – I’m Israeli and she’s Polish. But it was more than that. We clicked, we connected.

We were both part of the same bunch of crazies from the class who drank together after lectures most Fridays. I have some memories of other group outings – a visit to a pub where we played table football, a lebanese restaurant, the odd party in someone’s house. But she and I met not just in the context of the group, we would visit each other at home, we had long phone calls, we sometimes met straight after work – there was a place we adopted where they served lemon tea, which is hard to find in England… Anyway, we were close friends, we talked about everything, we cried on each other’s shoulder when we needed to. When she got a job in Warsaw for a while, I went to visit her there for a weekend and we had a wonderful time, doing a kind of “cake crawl” and discussing guys in between. When she came back to London and met a new guy and they moved in together, I met him. When she had a baby I went to the hospital to visit, bringing stuff she’d asked me for. (The birth was complicated and they had to stay in hospital for a while.) At that stage we were at opposite ends of London but every now and again I got on the train and went to visit. I remember walks in the park with her little daughter in the pushchair. Chats into the evening, M cooking something and me staying the night on their sofa and heading to work from there the next morning.

I have some great memories of our friendship. But I think it’s gone. Fizzled out. Just fizzled out – no row, no drama, but I think it’s time I faced up to facts: she’s not really my friend any more. not an enemy, but not a friend.

Is it just that she’s not the type for keeping in touch by email? I don’t know, I don’t think it would help to try analysing it. All I know is this:

At some stage we lost touch, I don’t remember the details now but I think the email address I had for her wasn’t working any more and I didn’t know how to find her and I mentioned this to my brother, who is very good at finding things out (maybe he should have developed a career as a private detective) and he somehow found her new Hotmail address, and she seemed sincerely pleased to hear from me. I don’t think we ever clarified what had happened, we just carried on as though nothing had happened.

And at some stage I got married – here in England, whilst she was living in Poland – and she phoned me on my mobile on the morning of the wedding to wish me luck or something like that, so there definitely was a friendship at that point.

And then she came to England for a visit, with her daughter who was 4 at the time (which makes it 2004), and she came to visit us and met my husband and we sat on the patio and had a great time.

And mostly we communicated by email, and then there was a stage where things were a bit unsettled at her end, she wasn’t sure if they could stay in their flat, and she thought she might be losing her job or maybe going down to part time or something – I can’t remember all the details now, just that there came a point where again I wasn’t sure how to contact her, the Hotmail address didn’t seem to be still in action, we’d been using her work email mainly but I got no answer from either, I don’t remember the ins and outs but at some point I just gave up and thought: well, I haven’t moved, if she wants to get in touch with me then she knows where to find me.

And then came the Facebook era. So now we go online and find people – people whom we lost touch with for all sorts of reasons… and sometimes it’s great, a chance to revive a friendship, and sometimes… sometimes it’s more a case of: well, if we had really wanted to stay in touch we would have, maybe there’s a reason why we lost contact :(

I had mixed feelings when I found her on FB, because I wasn’t sure where we were really, I wasn’t sure if there was still a friendship there. I felt hurt that she had allowed things to get like that, that she had allowed us to lose contact, that she hadn’t made any effort to let me know what was going on with the flat and the job and so on – just letting me get worried and not filling me in. Yes, I felt hurt, I felt ignored, I felt snubbed. But I decided to give her another chance, so I sent her an invitation to be a “friend” on FB. Which she accepted.

Then I wrote on her wall saying something kind of casual about how it’s been a long time and could I have an update – I made a huge effort to keep it casual, not to show how hard this was for me. Because I didn’t want to put pressure on her – I wanted her to only talk to me if she wanted to. I wanted to just kind of say: I’m still here and I still care about you. Her response was to say she’s got a small baby and no time to herself, which I accepted. So I allowed our communication to remain at the level of casual status updates. Okay, she did say something a few times about me coming to visit her in Krakow, but I’m not really much of a traveller these days and wasn’t seriously considering it.

But now – there was a status update she posted commenting about London being so cold and from that I learned that she was in England for Christmas – I don’t know how long she’d been but then when I saw that I replied and said “so are you in England?” and she said “yes, I’m in England till Sunday”.

and I am left with tears. Because a friend would have made a teensy bit of effort to see if we could get to see each other whilst she’s here. Even if she has lost my phone number, she could send me a message on Facebook. If after all we’d been through together, she can’t even be bothered to think of letting me know she’s going to be in England – well, I don’t think there’s much left there. No. I really don’t think there is.

Which is why I resisted the urge to say maybe we could at least talk on the phone before Sunday. Because I don’t want crumbs of charity, I don’t want her to call and make the right noises just because I said this.

I don’t know what happened between spring 2004, when I was worth coming to visit, and December 2010 – but clearly something has, clearly I do not occupy the same place in her life, I am no longer important enough to her for the tiniest effort to at least let me know she’ll be in England rather than allowing me to find out through a casual comment she made on FB about the weather!!!

Okay, I think I’ve got the message. I think that’s it, no more initiatives from me. F*** you, my dear ex-friend. I’m hurt, I’m angry, I’m feeling so very very disappointed and hurt, because we had such a close friendship that I never thought it would fizzle out like this. but there it is – where once there was a really close friendship, all that is left is… nothing… fb status updates saying nothing…

Part of me wishes I had never sent her that FB invitation.

Part of me feels like removing her off my FB list.

But mainly, I just want to cry.

You aren’t here to serve me.

You can’t be

the person I’d like you to be

and that’s okay.

I can’t be

the person you’d like me to be

I expect you to accept me anyway

by the same token, I must accept the fact that you can’t change to accommodate me. nor do you have to – I’m not God.

and so, instead of grumbling about your attitudes, your behaviour, the things you do and say which bug me

instead of all that

I choose to release you, to allow you the freedom

which I demand for myself

the freedom to be yourself

just as you are

warts and all

that’s the kind of acceptance I want from you

that’s the kind of acceptance I get from God

it’s what I must give to you too.

it means letting go of my own agenda,

of the self-centred tendency to want everything to go my way,

the inclination to view other people through the lens of how they affect me -

the truth is that other people are not here to serve me

and that doing stuff that I don’t like is not the worst crime in the universe.

 

My problem is my problem.

My problem is not your problem.

That doesn’t make it any less real, less painful, less urgent. Just a question of correct allocation – what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is yours.

Example: I have insecurity issues, related to painful experiences in the past when people suddenly stopped speaking to me without any explanation. This affects the way I react emotionally when you – a friend – don’t phone/don’t reply to my email/etc. This is a problem, a painful one for me. But it’s not your problem.

I could try to make it your problem. I could say: if you’re going to be my friend, I need you to become better at replying to emails. But that wouldn’t be fair on you. My insecurity is not your fault and it’s not your problem. It’s my problem, and it’s up to me to learn to deal with it.

So-and-so hasn’t emailed me back, I say to myself, I wonder if they’re cross with me about something.

But then I can remind myself that most of the time that’s not the way it goes, most of the time people just have other stuff going on. The world doesn’t revolve around me – the reason for someone’s behaviour is not necessarily to do with anything I’ve done, in fact it very often isn’t.

And this is part of what’s so useful about having this blog here, where I’m anonymous, where I can talk about what’s going on for me without dumping it onto my friends – it’s a way of keeping my problems my problems.

Not that I don’t believe in sharing stuff with friends – of course I do. But there’s a question of time and place and of how you do it. A friend is not the same as a diary, a friend is only human and you have to take their feelings into consideration, you can’t just treat them as a free dumping ground for everything you’re struggling with. Especially if what you’re struggling with is connected to how you relate to them – no, it wouldn’t be fair on them. That’s why there is the general consensus in the world of counselling or therapy that you don’t go to someone you know from other contexts – so you’re talking to someone who is not part of your normal life, someone who is outside of the situation you’re in, and that means you can really talk about everything. Like with a diary, but in counselling you’re talking to a person who can reflect back what you’ve said, help you hear yourself, give you the chance to feel you’ve been heard and understood by another human being, also throw the odd helpful question in your direction, giving you different perspectives on your situation, challenging you when what you’ve been saying doesn’t add up, helping you to think through your options.

And of course there is God, who is always there and always willing to listen, and is never going to reject me no matter what I do or say. That’s the one completely safe and secure relationship I have – one friend who will never let me down. I was going to add he’ll never stopped replying to my metaphorical emails but then I thought: actually he does that to people sometimes, he does put people through silence. But no rejection – just a temporary shutting down of communication channels. Not a rejection, not an ending of the relationship.

Humans have sometimes rejected me. But that’s part of life, it hurts but we can’t all like everybody, I don’t like everybody and I have rejected people – and I know sometimes I’ve even done it without explaining why, when I felt it was pointless, when I felt the other person just wouldn’t understand, or that whatever I say would only make things worse. I mean, say you met someone through friends and this person seemed nice and fun and witty and you started communicating with this person more and more and then at some stage you realised that the more you know them the less you like them – I’ve had this online, on a social networking site, and ended up removing that person from my contacts list and thought, there’s just no way of explaining why without being horrible. Or there was the time when I removed a contact from my list there because I’d got fed up with her lack of communication – she had invited me to be her contact but she hardly read any of my posts and she never responded to my comments on her posts, there was just no indication that she was interested in building a friendship at all, so one day I got fed up and removed her, and got a private message from her saying “sorry to have lost you as a friend” and I thought: but we were never friends! again, I zipped my mouth shut and said nothing, as it seemed pointless.

So I have to allow for other people to sometimes do that to me, hurtful though it is. It’s just the way life goes. Friendships go through phases, sometimes they fizzle out, sometimes it can be circumstances changing but other times it may be that the more we know someone, the less we like them, and there’s a point where we think: why am I flogging this dead horse? Just as I’ve sometimes got off a horse and hurt someone’s feelings, it’s bound to happen the other way round sometimes. And somehow I have to learn to live with that.

No, it wasn’t you I was worried about, it was just my self-esteem.

here’s a short quiz.

you sent an email to a friend with an important question. it’s been four weeks and you haven’t had a reply. do you:

a) get angry

b) start worrying that something has happened to them

c) start worrying that this friend is cross with you

d) not notice that it’s been four weeks

I tend to do mostly c, but pretend that it’s b because I don’t want to appear so needy and insecure. So I’ll email and say: are you ok? haven’t heard from you for a while. And when they reply and thank me for my concern, I feel like a complete and utter fraud.

The thing is, there are some good reasons why I keep expecting friends to shut me out and stop speaking to me. Good, historic reasons. Basically – this has happened to me, on several occasions. And it hurt. badly. so I keep expecting it to happen again. But I know that neediness and low self-esteem are very unattractive qualities, so I try to hide them. I try to seem nonchalant, like it isn’t a huge big deal to me if you don’t answer my emails… like I don’t remember how long it’s been since you last called… like I don’t have this big need to feel wanted. because if you knew, you wouldn’t want to be friends with me. and I need people to want to be friends with me.

I am actually trying to learn to be more honest about these things. Recently I had two opportunities to practise this new skill. Two situations where I thought I’d offended someone and that this is why they were in one case not replying to my email and in the other case no longer on my friends list on facebook. In each case, my instinct was to just leave it, say nothing, put on a brave nonchalant face, and carry on worrying internally… In each case I instead took a deep breath and wrote to say I wonder if I’ve offended them and if I have then I apologise. And in each case the very clear answer was that no, I hadn’t offended them, there were other reasons for their behaviour and these reasons had nothing to do with me – in the facebook un-friending case it was simply technology misbehaving, and in the case of not replying to my email there were reasons to do with pressure of work plus a recent bereavement which meant this person just hadn’t had the spare time and energy to deal with my email.

In other words: no, I am not the centre of the universe…

Just because people have seen your face

and know what shoes you wear, that doesn’t mean they really know you.

People talk sometimes as though online connections are somehow less real than those you have with people you meet out there in “real life”. But some of the deepest conversations I’ve had, some of the closest friendships I’ve built over time, are with people I’ve only spoken to via screen and keyboard. Some of my online friends know me far better than those who have met me a zillion times – you can meet people again and again and never get past the “how are you? fine, thanks” stage. People are so often in such a hurry, moving on to talk to the next person before they’ve heard your reply.

Online, there is time. You don’t have to come up with a quick answer, you can take your time and think what you want to say. You can come back to a conversation the next day. You can send each other replies at all sorts of odd times, it doesn’t even matter if you’re in completely different time zones. The only real barrier is that of language – otherwise, it’s open borders and it’s wonderful. I’m old enough to marvel at this “new” development, old enough to remember the days before mobile phones, when if you wanted to talk to someone you had to catch them at home, at a time that suited both of you. (Hey, I’m even old enough to have a vague childhood memory of us getting a phone at home! and a television! Though other kids at school had already had TVs for a while – we were a bit behind the Jones’s…)

Anyway, what I was trying to say is this:

just because someone has really met me,
that doesn’t mean they really know me;
and just because someone hasn’t really met me,
that doesn’t mean they don’t know me – in the most real sense of the word.

Woke up feeling like I hate life

do you ever have that feeling? I don’t often, but today I did. I know people who will tell me to count my blessings/go for a walk/all sorts of good ideas… the thing is, all those suggestions come across to me as insensitive/patronising/pressurising when all I wanted to do was vent my feelings. At times like those, I don’t really want those “helpful” friends around, I want to be allowed to just say: this is how I’m feeling right now.

all I want from a friend at such a time is an understanding nod.

once I’ve let out the feelings, brought them into the open and looked at them, even showed them to others – they become less scary. there’s something really freeing about just saying: I feel like I hate life.

I don’t really hate life. I just get these feelings sometimes. Mostly – mostly life is ok, it has its difficulties of course but it does have a humungous amount of good stuff too. I have a loving husband who makes me laugh and is even good at listening when I need to talk about feelings, I have some good friends, some very good friends, I live in a pleasant neighbourhood, I…

see, this is what happens when you try to force it, it comes out kind of lame.

right now, today, I’m not feeling very happy. I know in my head that there are some very good things in my life, but my heart isn’t resonating with it, my heart is down, glum, wanting to hide under the duvet.

some of it is because of the season – as soon as the clocks change from summertime and we get these insanely early sunsets, my battle with SAD begins. and yesterday I didn’t get out in daylight, which probably explains at least in part why I’m feeling so glum today. I’ve been really trying to get some exposure to daylight every day, even if it’s just a brief walk in my neighbourhood. Some days I even resorted to just sitting on the patio.

the thing is, waking up with this feeling as I did today means that I feel even less inclined to get out of the house. especially with the weather out there looking grey and wet. but I know that I need to do that in order to get out of this glumness.

ok, here’s the deal – it’s twenty to three now, school run time, the streets round here are going to be full of mums and kids for a while – I’ll rest a bit until it’s over, and at 3.30 I’m out of here no matter what.