“The Silent Treatment”

Twenty years on, I am handing over a secret to its rightful owner. I can’t bear to carry it around anymore.

In the late fall of 1983, professor Harold Bloom did something banal, human, and destructive: He put his hand on a student’s inner thigh—a student whom he was tasked with teaching and grading. The student was me, a 20-year-old senior at Yale. Here is why I am telling this story now:

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/n_9932/

1 week ago  /  0 notes

Porous emotional rocks

My perception of someone’s emotions affects my own emotions to a degree that I believe is too high to be healthy.

Yesterday, I was feeling consciously annoyed with one of my quasi-friends. He was behaving with an icy mixture of cordiality and indifference, as he had been for a couple weeks. [non-internet-safe broodings omitted]…. and rEALLy, It’s just annoying to not receive an answering greeting to your “Hey *slight wave*”.

All day (whenever the topic crossed my mind) I felt this way, a distaste for the guy, like a eye-squinting eyebrow-lowering facial twitch, day-old-unbrushed-mouth distaste. Then he apologized. And it was gone. I was barely even me anymore, more him (my perception of him) than me. I was a me that had be forced by my environment to make the decisions I’d seen him make, and I had made the right ones, I hadn’t had a choice. I saw myself though his eyes (my perception of his perception of me) and there it was, a feeling that IS NOT MINE swimming through my brain:

I’VE caused this. It’s MY fault he has had to act cold towards me. Would I expect him to choose my comfort over that of…? 

Him: “Hey, sorry if I’ve been kinda rude over House Parties and Lawn Parties and stuff”

Me: “:/ Oh, oh no. I understand. If I were in your position… I see why you have to do this. Don’t worry about it :) [Other joking dribbling omitted].” 

1 week ago  /  0 notes