Nancy's Musings

As a follow-up to my previous post, my friend and I are still negotiating friendship. I have discovered that for my emotional health, I need verbal affirmation. I need someone to say nice things because the voices in my head are unusually cruel, and I don't have the self-confidence to fight them on my own while under the pressure of near-constant low-level rejection (and the bitter shrieking of professional rejection). Anyway, I brainstormed some nice things to say to mitigate the pain of rejection, and since I put a lot of work into it and some of them made me laugh, I thought I'd share some. Feel free to use them if you yourself are ever called upon to give me bad news. "I don't love you, but . . . . . . When you fall in love with someone else and leave me behind, there won’t be enough cookies to fill the void.” . . . If things were different I’d ask you on a real date, because I don’t find you repulsive and I think we’d have fun.” . . . I will admi...

Background: So I'm in love with a man who isn't in love with me for some unspecified (or unspecifiable) reason, and normally I'd just drop the acquaintance and look for someone else. Or become satisfied on my own (which I was, for a long time). But he wants to stay friends. This is new territory for me. I don't fall in love often (ever?), and staying in a painful situation is not really my M.O. either. But I'm sort of trapped, and I need to make this work. I'm also feeling vulnerable about admitting that I've been rejected, because it categorizes me. I'm one of the "rejected" rather than the "rejecting." But this is not a real distinction, and pooh to anyone who thinks that way. Anyway, this is some advice I wrote for him, and for other people who find themselves in his awkward situation, needing to hold a friend at arm's length, but still wishing to keep them close. *     *     * “She is tolerable, I suppose, but not ha...

It's not even noon yet on January 1st of this fresh hell of a year. (That's a Dorothy Parker allusion. I am not personally ready to condemn a whole year yet). So far in 2019, I have been grossly hurt by a woman with untreated bipolar disorder, and have seen other people be hurt as well, and seen their reactions which could also be hurtful. Perhaps it means nothing that eleven hours into the shiny new year, the pain is overwhelming everything else. I paid my bills. That was also painful. Telling my debtors that I can't pay them next month (or, like, ever) will also be painful, but I'm not going to do that today. Because it's a holiday and they probably won't answer their phones. I hope they don't. It's a holiday, and call center workers need holidays. Lots of them. I wanted to turn this into some resolution about forgiveness or something - some way to make this a positive, but I'm not ready yet. The inner turmoil is too fresh. I don't have a...