Categories: uncategorized
Date: 04 June 2010 09:22:34
I was ignored.
There's a girl I know, used to live round the corner from our street, working for the council (well, as a teacher), for what probably feels like twenty years. She's lovely, let's get that out of the way. She's caring and concerned about people, and is an all-round good person. But she drives me up the wall.
She has this little personality tic that makes her face you, make strong eye contact, and ask how you are in a way that makes you feel that she really wants to know, and that she really cares about how you are. So you answer. And before you've got five words in, she's turned her head away, and is clearly thinking about something else. So you finish your answer, and then she's back, with the eye contact again, and she asks you something else. With that same intensity, that same desperate desire to know completely how you are. And so, if you're as much of a sucker as I am, you're taken in again, and you begin to answer, trying to give as complete an answer as that intensity of questioning desire seems to require. And this time, if you're lucky, you get six words in before it happens. And it happens. It happens exactly as before - having set you up she just moves her attention away from you. Like a singer on a stage, exhorted, encouraged, begged to perform but then, after the first few notes, the spotlight is turned off or, worse, turned to somewhere else.
And that really gets to me. It shouldn't; I certainly can't explain why it does, not to the extent that it does get to me. It makes me feel like nothing. I suppose I'm carrying some deep predisposition to viewing myself as worthless, that is triggered by such behaviour. All I know is it temporarily kills me. If I have the option, then I will hunker down into myself, and not speak again to anyone for quite a while. (Unfortunately, with that particularly girl, politeness compels me to speak again, and again, every time she asks me anything, so I get to experience the pleasure over and over until I can finally overcome my resistance to impoliteness and walk away). I won't speak because a) nobody wants to hear what I have to say, and b) I don't want to go through that experience of rejection again.
But I can't seem to find a way out of that trap. The only answer seems to be to go on not speaking, not talking. At which point I might as well not be.