April showers...the second...

This is my second attempt at the "April Showers Bring May Flowers" theme that's happening this week on one of the Facebook groups I'm in:

"It's always raining in my head."

It always pays to read instructions...although the weekly challenge is just a suggestion, I want to 'do it right'!  And if I would have read the instructions...in my defense I did read them...at about two in the morning...(so, let's just say if I would have read them while I was coherent...), I would have noticed that they said "include flower and umbrella"...  The first page I did had a flower...and rain...but sadly, not an umbrella...so I just had to do another page!

This time, the flower is the umbrella, as suggested by one of my FB friends, who said in my first page the flower was an umbrella for all the little bugs hiding in the grass!  Genius, I thought, and wanted to make a page that showcased that brilliant idea!  So my little fairy has herself a flower umbrella, and that's that!

The quote is from a song by Staind.  "It's always raining in my head" is just written over and over again.  I have always heard (though I don't know if it's true) that if a person's favorite color is grey, it is a sign of possible mental illness, so I did the grey background and the quote repetition to signify depression and when I look at it, that's what I see.  I like the contrast between the bright, happy fairy colors and the bleakness of the background.  In my mind, it has the message that what we show on the outside is not always congruent with what's happening inside of us.  

It's been on my mind a lot lately that I wish people would just say what they mean.  I am THE WORST person in the world for not always having a 'filter', some kind of alarm that goes off in a normal brain that tells the mouth what's ok to say and what's better left unsaid.  Instead, my thoughts tend to shoot out of my mouth without that warning bell going off.  And it tends to lead to awkward situations, because for the most part people are not used to hearing things this way, and I've always thought of this tendency as a bad thing.  But recently, I'm starting to wish that more people were like me in this regard.  It could save a lot of time and energy.  

Not that people should say every thought that comes into their brain...dear goodness, how exhausting that would be!  But think how nice it would be if people were just honest with each other.  I'm not saying forget manners and give me brutal honesty; there's a kind way to do it.  But really, at this point, I'd take rude truth over sweet lies.  I've been lucky enough in my life to know a few people who I could trust to always tell me the truth, even if it's not what I wanted to hear.  But it's not a trait you come across every day, and I don't know why.  

And the why is what always gets me.

Today, I was having a conversation with one of my work friends about the whole 'why' question.  We were observing that another co-worker (whom I love ardently) either likes people or doesn't like people with no apparent rhyme or reason.  She meets you, and makes up her mind in that instant whether she is going to like you or not, and there is pretty well nothing you can do to change her mind about it.  I mentioned that I was so happy that she decided she liked me, for the simple reason that it would drive me crazy to know I was disliked but not know why.  And the friend I was talking to said to me "Sometimes there is no why."  And my brain stopped.  Because I can't imagine that...in my head, there's always a reason.  We might not get to know what it is, but it HAS to be there.  And my friend couldn't understand how that one little phrase bothered me so much.  But the truth is (to me anyway) the why is a resolution.  If a person gives you a reason, in this instance as to why they don't like you, you have two options.  You can decide if the person has a valid point and work to change your perceived flaw.  Or you can decide that person's reason is stupid and either work to change their mind about said reason or let it go and move on.  Whatever you decide, whatever way you go, that one little 'why' is the solution.

And I say that to say this:  I've recently lost a good friend of mine over a stupid and inconsequential spat.  I've done everything I can do to reconcile, but to no avail.  Not only will this person not talk to me, but they even refuse to look at me or be in the same room with me if they can help it.  Though I don't feel like I was in the wrong, I sincerely apologized, because this friendship was more important to me than being right.  I was told to 'let it alone'.  

And I therefore conclude two things:  that whatever this is about, it's not about this little tiff (I won't say what it actually was, but let's say it was as stupid as someone being mad at you for saying the sky is blue or saying that you don't like to wear hats...just something as stupid as that)...and that's where the why comes in.  I think I could let it go, I could have a little closure at least, if the person would just tell me why they're so mad.  What did I do that's so bad they can't even look at me?  Because I honestly don't know.  And in not knowing the problem, I will never be able to find a solution, or know if I even want to find a solution.  

The second conclusion I've drawn from this is that clearly I valued our friendship much more than the other person did.  If they were truly my friend, they would at least give me some kind of reason for their sudden disdain.  But, sadly, not so much.  And that's brings us back around to my wish for people to just say what they mean.  If I don't like someone, I wouldn't be rude to them, but I also wouldn't choose to spend any significant amount of time with them either.  I wouldn't make conversation with them, and certainly wouldn't seek them out.  But maybe that's just me.  And that's why I'm wishing people were a little more like me right now.  If at the beginning I would have heard, "we're friends because it's convenient and that may or may not last", I'd probably be a lot less hurt and disappointed than I am right now.  Another of my friends told me that I should pretend that this all doesn't bother me.  And honestly, there's nothing more I can do, even if I wanted to.  I've said all I can say, and so now, anything other than apathy will come across as the desperation of a crazy person, and while crazy, I'm not desperate.  

In the end, unless the other person has a change of heart, I really do have to find a way to let this go.  That's what this page is really about for me.  On the outside, I'm going about my daily life with a smile on my face acting as 'normal' as my version of normal ever is.  On the inside, there's a constant hurricane blowing in my head, with "Why? Why? Why?" circling around in there and it's hard to find peace with all that noise.  Eventually, none of it will matter anymore.  There will either be a reconciliation or the death of what was, for me at least, a beautiful friendship, and it will get buried in the mental dirt that daily life provides and the only memory of it will be a small tombstone that reads "what might have been".

At least doing the above journal page and writing about it has proven mildly cathartic.  Mildly akin to flatulence, emotional turmoil like this is always better out than in.  Sorry you had to listen to my mental farts...