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I have been holding back my feelings, trying to be compassionate and supportive of you, my friend and your feelings. I was attempting to explain how your behavior had offended me, as a person and a friend. I was trying to help you to be a better person and make us both happier. It seems I have failed because you are fighting me like a rabid animal and I am bleeding from the mouth.
There is always a fine line between telling the truth and hurting someone’s feelings and sometimes without trying you end up doing both.
Instead of getting listening ears, I got moving lips of rage, operating from what seemed to be an unknown payment plan that would attempt to secure my silence. It opened a door of abandonment for me to realize, surprised, the gifts you had given me were not gifts really at all, but gifts of control and payments of silence.
I found out you did not truly want to hear my voice, unless you could control it like keeping a dog on a leash. I was shocked at the depth of your sense of lack, your sense powerlessness. You could not hear me beyond the roar of your fears. I was only trying to tell you I was having a hard time breathing with you sucking the air out of the room. I thought we were sharing the air. I see you know nothing of sharing, but you needed to own the air and the opening of my nostrils.
You did not want me to breath on my own.
Even if I am as wrong as two left shoes, let me experience my journey of being and learning. I have no need to be an echo of you. I know my own name and the color of my own voice. I came to this planet to be me in its highest form. I am trying to honor my God-given gift, not trying to dance to the flavor and the song of your perception of me. I felt the need to protect myself from the triggers of my past.
I am sorry I may have hurt your feelings. It was not my intention.
I was feeling full of building resentment from your need to control me and all others around you. I felt as if I were being herded like a piece of cattle sometimes in your presence. I understand the need to control, it is my own personal perception I battled with for years and on a daily basis.
Because of the failure of my attempts to control and recognizing the effects it had on people around me, I have given up trying to control people. My job, as a human being and an artist, is to control my behavior and the effects it has on other humans. I have learned to focus on perfecting the gift of my human voice. I did not mean to hurt your feelings, I was just trying not to be personally hurt. I was trying to get away like a wounded animal. It seems I have wounded you and for that I am sorry.
It is a delicate balance in the art of speaking your personal truth.
It is an art form where compassionate acts are the brushes you learn to use to paint your words and pictures you are trying to give as gifts to another human being. It is a delicate balance to serve and be served.
As I watch your actions, I see myself and I do take note, sometimes you have to feed strong and intelligent people with long-handled spoons. A strong person will chew off their own leg in order to free themselves of a situation, whether they are right or wrong. The freedom is the issue. We are both seeking our own form of freedom.
Also, there comes a time when you have to say no to what does not serve you or what has the power to enslave you. I have always walked the pathway of pushing the envelope. In doing so, I always seem to encounter seeing the nose of disapproval and the words and stares of judgment from others. I thought I had gotten use to the pattern of rejection.
I was trying to speak to you in a voice of compassion and you received it as me being weak, being a victim.
I only felt the victimization you seem to be giving me. Even with you being a woman who has experienced being victimized, you were engaging in the act of disregarding my words and making me wrong for expressing my feelings. I may not have gotten them out of my mouth in the proper order, but I was practicing a new skill of compassionate disagreement. It seems you had not gotten the memo. It seems I had pushed your buttons of guarded defense and there was no clear communication, but only a war of two broken hearts.
I will let go and walk away in hopes that time will reveal my intentions and the words that came from heart and passed through the lips of my mouth. I will not force you to listen. I can only hope my words of compassion will touch the fibers of your mind and heart. We can be such victims of our traumatic pasts and many times we cannot hear the truth for hearing the words of disappointment and feelings of being wrong.
In these modern times, we don’t always have the polished skills of telling compassionate truth.
I will not give up on the process because I now know more than I did before I attempting using this new skill with you. I am on a learning curve and I will stay in this circle of loving.
I do believe practice allows me to become more accomplished at my new means of living and loving. I will trust the process and I will trust the honesty of my truth until I learn differently. I feel a bit wounded, but I will wrap the open wounds and step back into my first intention.
I believe in compassion, honest conversation.
I stand in commitment to the act of resolution and I stand in the belief that in time we will make it right and we will get it right with practice. These acts of loving are not always the norm in our modern world, but I will continue to take the risk.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images