What most people don't know about me is that although I'm strong, I'm not tough. I bleed easily, although only those who are closest to me know that. It's not something I particularly like people to know, because there have been so many who have exploited it in the past. In fact, my iron strength is what I've had to develop in order to keep people from getting to my soft center...
Over the years I've learned to recognize a certain order of phases that I go through when someone hurts me:
- My first response is pain. It hurts. Badly. I try to figure out how someone can be so heartless as to want to cause pain to another human being, especially me.
- When that fails I turn to self-doubt. I figure the other person is right about me, that I'm the worst person ever to walk the earth and that I deserve to be reviled and shunned by all humankind. I begin to think that I don't deserve to live and that if the person took me out, they would be justified.
- I then turn indignant. I pick up a fook that attitude and get really pissed off. That's when I'm liable to say some pretty unkind things, either about or to them.
- The next step is resolution. I don't like being angry because it makes me physically ill, due to the Hashimoto's Disease. I'm a Libra, after all, and I'm all about fixing problems and balancing situations to bring about peaceful resolutions. I'll try to reason with the person, I'll explain my point of view and ask for theirs; I want to reach a compromise, or at least an understanding; my goal is resolution, not winning.
- When that doesn't work, I disappear for a while. I go inside and wait for them to come to a place where they too want resolution.
- Of course, some people just want to win. The situation isn't even about the issue anymore and all they want is, at best, to be right or, at worst, to get revenge. Again, I go through the phases a second time, da capo, but this time the anger phase is worse. I get defensive and I sometimes attack verbally. Like an animal caught in a trap, all I want is to be free of whatever is causing the pain. If there was actually a spell to turn them into a frog I'd use it, only to regret it later.
- Finally, I just get tired of the torture and I make the person and the issue disappear. "Poof! Be gone!" is something I've been heard to say on a number of occasions. I simply write that person and their crap out of my life and it doesn't matter if they get in my face--I don't see them. They have ceased to be. In fact, this ability to make people vanish is so thorough that, in my mind, they never existed in the first place and I get upset when other people bring them or the issue up in conversation. That's why I don't like talking about my exes, whether friends or lovers. Don't mention their name to me or else you'll get an impatient look from me, but that's because, regardless of what phase I'm in, there's still pain in there and I don't want to feel it.
