Essay 06 of 25
Wow! Where to begin with this one?!? Friend, Family, Romantic Partner, frienemy, enemy? Yep, I have loved my enemies and celebrated them and their accomplishments.
I know I’m the villain in the story of some people. I embrace this reality of both sides of my humanity — supportive angel and fallen, imperfect, flawed [hu]man.
Perhaps this is a tough one because who comes to mind is more about hurting someone who loves/loved me vs. who I love.
I’ve been on the receiving end of profound soul-crushing disappointments. Unfortunately, the ones that did the most damage resulted in pieces of my broken heart left on the field.
Adam, a good friend and colleague reminded me that my perspective is the view from my “end of the row boat.” In other words, I see the person at the opposite end of the boat and the horizon behind them. So likewise, those who feel I’ve hurt them look at me and the horizon behind me from the other end of that boat we shared. His point is we see the world from what’s in front of us, our perspective. We don’t see the world from the perspective of others.
“To see ourselves as others see us!” (Robert Burns, 1786)
Woman Rowing Boat — iStockPhoto.com
From their perspective, I might have hurt them in both words and deeds. It is a classic about the truth. There is my story, their story, and the truth falls somewhere in between.
In earlier days, I admit, I was not always “impeccable with my words” (Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997). I hadn’t mastered the art of arguing reasonably. As we were getting into one, I recall one Ex remarked to me,
“I have to be careful arguing with you because I’ll go into trial mode and destroy you.”
As I recall, we both laughed and didn’t argue. That was circa 2006; she was fun. I hope she found her, “Wow!”
https://medium.com/hello-love/second-renaissance-23c10db5db8b
Maybe there was that one time when I didn’t sustain a relationship with a girlfriend who had to leave college. Or the one who changed her mind about not wanting to have a child but changed her mind, but then changed it back. I hope she found the guy who gave her the family she wanted.
Perhaps it was one of several times when someone who loved me felt that I wasn’t there for them or could have been more, done more, or fought harder. But unfortunately, only they knew; they never shared those thoughts with me.
Maybe it was those times that I broke up with three girlfriends who were meta-women (circa 1981, 2002, and 2004) — https://medium.com/hello-love/making-peace-with-those-meta-women-7c0d21143585.
Making Peace with Those Meta-Women – iStockPhoto.com
If there is such a thing, Karma is a “cold piece” because the last meta-woman I dated was not only a heartbreaker but a soul-crusher. I don’t know if anyone can find any remnants of a heart that has been pulverized. How does one find dust once scattered in the wind?
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I’ve learned along this journey that “it is not wise to try to compare pain.”
I’m sure if I highlight one specific example of a hurt I might have inflicted on someone I loved, the other people I loved and love reading this would say, “He must be talking about someone else; what about how he hurt me?!?” Sparking yet another round of hurt feelings by my not elevating their hurt to the top.
Suffice it to say that over the past half-century, I’ve loved family, friends, girlfriends, fiancés, mothers/wives of my children, and my children, and I have hurt and disappointed them all at one time or another. I realized after a revelation around 1992 that as men/people/humans, we have “feet of clay.” Walking in this world is hard when your head is made of gold, a body of silver, legs of iron on feet made of clay (biblical reference here). Soft, unstable, and weak. I’ll never be canonized as a saint, but that is okay. I still apologize for my sins to the people I’ve loved, loved, and all those others who might have felt slighted and elected not to share their hurt feelings.
Is it never too late to share? Unfortunately, sometimes it is too late. Several people in a business context shared such a feeling about two years after the fact. One case stands out; it comes in the form of an ambush after a clandestine one-day cross-continental round trip. My colleague and I were blindsided and floored by the revelation in the conference room of people we thought of as fellow warriors in the fight for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI). What they shared could have been shared via phone vs. ten hours of round-trip flights.
Passenger Jet — iStockPhoto.com
After the pain was reviled and my apologies offered, we were goodish. I write “goodish” because the relationship was never quite the same ever again after that. We still did business together and crushed some things together for the betterment of communities. However, to this day, and some $300K leveraged into over $1.3M, I still “feel some kinda way” about that day and how that pain sharing of a perceived intentional slight “went down” from people who I didn’t love. Still, I respected them as colleagues and fellow warriors. Humans.
The takeaway insight from that reality, that experience is that harboring hurt feelings in silence leads to resentment that can manifest itself inappropriately like an ambush or an explosion of negative emotion at an inappropriate time.
I firmly believe that some things should never be said aloud or shared in any context or setting; those things, truths, thoughts, and deeds should all be taken to the grave. I’m taking my cue from Ricky Ricardo from I Love Lucy.
Spoiler alert, the four main characters get trapped in an avalanche on a mountain, and after some time of running low on food, Lucy, Fred, and Ethel start confessing the things they’ve done that their spouses didn’t know about because they believe they’re going to die. When they look to Ricky to offer up his confessions, he says something like, ‘Oh not me, we might make it out of here alive.’ They did, of course (Lucy in the Swiss Alps, March 1956 — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0609292/). I’ve got a couple/few of my own, going in the ground. There are more contemporary examples of such storylines, Sex In the City, the movies 2008 and 2010, and Run the World, TV series on STARZ, Season 1, Episodes 7 and 8, 2021).
Making a case for taking truths (secretes) to the grave may seem contradictory to what I wrote about speaking one’s truth. However, wisdom knows when not to weaponize truth such that it comes with cruelty. Using it to be self-serving to assuage one’s guilt, for vengeance, and vindictiveness as opposed to enlighten and heal. The question I ask myself when it comes to “trying to not harm” by my words is, “What does the person I plan to speak to have to profit from my words or my truth? If I can’t answer that inner question in a positive, I elect to keep my words to myself.
So when I’m sitting in that boat opposite the person who I love, what do I see? Knowing that they don’t see the same thing, they see me and the horizon behind me that I can’t see. Have I hurt them? Can they use their voice and their agency and tell me? Maybe they shouldn’t and eventually, make peace with it and move on as I have and will.
Essay 06 of 25–07.24.2022
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com