Continued from yesterday, where the author discussed leaving a friendship where confrontation wasn’t possible.

I wanted to sit down with this dear friend of mine and tell him what I felt. I wanted to look him in the eye and tell him that things were not okay and that for things to be okay there was work to be done. But I didn’t have a chance to say those things and because I didn’t have that chance, I left the friendship feeling particularly bitter and upset. I ventured to speculate why I was feeling so down. Well, any quasi-intellectual worth his or her salt has a tendency to take experiences and, let’s say, “spend a little too much time with them in the brain-blender. “ More precisely, things are over-analyzed and eventually acquire a higher degree of importance in one’s hierarchy of emotional importance than they probably should. Sometimes the occasional gem tumbles out before coagulation sets in. In this case, I concluded that I was feeling upset because I wasn’t able to force my friend to experience the recent turn of events as I would like him to experience it. In other words, I wanted him to feel lousy because I felt like he deserved to feel lousy. Continue reading →