Knife to the heart

The first cut is just the first in a long line… even if it is the deepest

SUMMER 1976

The last time I was this distraught about doing the right thing, I’d been 15 years old. But actually back then I didn’t do the right thing at all…. I poured my heart out on lined notepaper torn from my science folder. That still wasn’t the wrong thing, I didn’t believe so … after all it served to clarify my roiling emotions, the wrong thing was that I posted it. Oh, this was back in the day when people sent each other letters, just to be clear. The internet and Facebook were decades in the future. An agonising fortnight had passed… then the familiar blue envelope hit the doormat… it felt lighter than usual…

Feeling uneasy, I stuffed the unopened envelope into my blazer pocket.. and set off for school via my best friend Louise’s house
I walked to school every day with Louise and that day I had a gut feeling… I was going to really need her.

FRIENDSHIP

“I got a letter from Johnny today… “, I muttered as we started to walk together, having met at the bottom of the hill that was Louise’s street. “Well, aren’t you going to open it?, you have been going on about every possible outcome … since you posted yours… ? “. Look, you said what you wanted to say…

I felt the thin envelope in my pocket, I knew I’d have to look at it sooner or later, but considering Johnny used to get in to trouble with his mother for “using up all the good writing paper” it’s slenderness was ringing alarm bells….

Ok, bite the bullet I told myself .. he has probably been busy … so it’s just a brief catch up…

I tore open the blue envelope with the oh so familiar writing… then I felt my world tilt….
I KNEW IT

The one sheet of paper wasn’t even filled. Only a few lines that delivered the full force of a punch.. “it’s not working” “we need to finish this…” and not much more than that… there was certainly no reason why….

I knew, as I sobbed, because I started to howl almost immediately, that the reason why was that I’d poured all the feelings I had for him into the page. Feelings that had grown over the months and that he had encouraged, I had made myself incredibly vulnerable… these days I’d probably be ghosted. Then blocked for good measure.

LESSON LEARNED

And here I was again.. 40 years later, this was not a romance though… but I had been reminded so much of a teenage trauma ( a different one) by the actions of a so called friend who had, it initially appeared, to have understood me quite well… that I’d gone into a kind of shocked state that only getting the emotions out would mitigate. So I did that… by writing a message I would never send.. I was wary now of ever communicating what I felt… as I had never forgotten my earliest trauma.. and on a practical level I knew the unkindness wasn’t personal though I was very pissed off, it was only thoughtlessness I was dealing with. However, I was so disappointed that my friend hadn’t sought to avoid the completely avoidable, particularly as that would have been easy to do without them missing out on anything. It was as if they had deliberately sought to behave in a hurtful manner, or at least actually understood so little about me that they acted without care. At this point I felt done with the friendship. I wasn’t actually sure of that, but as I wrote out my feelings I realised how little about myself I’d been able to convey to my friend. And that the fact was, they really weren’t that interested. I moved to erase my rant.. it was self indulgent, no matter how true it was….

TECHNOLOGY SUCKS
Oh holy crap. I sent it. Oh well ok it was a true reflection of my feelings in that moment….but this was not good….

BROKEN

And now as I surveyed the broken friendship a few years down the track.. first they .. then I had tried to fix the situation with the caveat that things would not be the same. They couldn’t and shouldn’t be expected to be the same, but there had been enough good feeling between us to keep goodwill…but it irked me still that I had tried very hard to meet expectations… and this had never been acknowledged.. only my bad behaviour … which had been limited, provoked and apologised for, I realised too that we had been equal in the game because this time I’d been very unforgiving too. I had tried to put this kindly as I was aware that it was my issue. However even years later I felt unheard… and fear had made it impossible for me to speak, if I’d said I wanted peace and had still been met with anger, I could not face it. I felt the right thing was just to let it lie…. even though there was originally potential to heal things. My early relationship trauma had taught me to not say what I felt, no matter how strongly I felt it. Like most people I let fear rule my actions, and nothing much had changed in four decades.

PUT YOURSELF FIRST

The first cut is a lesson on the danger of entanglements and attachments when you don’t really care enough about yourself… I mused on this as I liked myself more now than I ever did as a teenager…but still recently caused and received hurt in circumstances that were easily avoidable. Seemed that until you truly gave zero weight to things… that people say and do..really grasp that whatever they say and do really has nothing to do with you…that knife was there with its sharp edge ready to get you anytime