Justified

In the end, like most good humans, I've managed to justify my bad behavior. I spent the weekend, my ruined weekend, as ruined by me, in tears and sick with self loathing. I felt horrible about the situation, anxious about my friend, fractured and confused.

There were two long emails. From each of us. I know people shake their heads thinking "emails aren't the answer, you should have talked' but I'm not convinced. You can't convince me that sitting down and processing and carefully choosing words is dramatically worse then talking in anger and saying things in the heat of the moment.

Suffice to say that her final word was that I was moody, self righteous, unfair and not anyone's definition of a good friend.
Which I took. And considered.
And agree with the perception of.

I also reared and reread her words. That she was never going to trust me, that the things she told me were processing, not reality, and that I had ... oh, essentially betrayed her by a dozen small actions.

And you know. I was sorry.
Because when I look at it from her point of view, those are pretty heinous offenses. And when I see them as she must have seen them, I can see that without knowing my backstory, it certainly did seem I was fickle, insane, what have you.

So I thought about it a bit more and wrote her an apology. Truly. Along the lines of Darcy in Pride & Prejudice that in pride and vanity I believed what I thought about her to be true. That I didn't ever address it with her, that I was convinced I understood her nature. I said I was sorry for seeing her in the worst possible light, and for seeing things ugly and unflattering. That I did judge her for who I thought she was and yes, that  many times I was reacting to this, wrong, belief about her.That I was sorry I erred and that I assumed the interactions I had with her were her actual state, not an aberration. That I'm sorry I thought the worst.
She felt she was confiding in someone she trusted and that I had storehoused a litany of things to use against her. I felt she was a certain way, and saw examples, myriad, supporting what I believed to be true... and it fueled my perception. In all cases, what a sorry state of affairs.

But it's an interesting impasse.

Because to be fair, I'm universally nice to every service person I have ever met. Be it waitress, delivery man, gas attendant. I go out of my way to not inconvenience anyone, I wait without complaint in line, I don't shift from foot to foot, I have my card ready, I say "zero" instead of "Oh" when I'm reading an insurance card. But I'll guarantee you, there has been at least one time that I have been in someones space, specifically, say, the florist last week - and have been ungracious and uncooperative. I can say that I was upset presurgery, I was upset by the impersonal touch of flowers, upset  for a host of reasons, notwithstanding that I thought the flowers were poorly executed - and I can say with FULL certainty that the woman who runs that shop, in her history books, forever etched in her mind if it made an impression at all, I'm a bitch. I'm an awful, rude, ungrateful bitch.

Which couldn't be further from the truth.
(meh, play nice, you.)
But that's how I behaved.
I don't get a chance to rewrite that history, that impression.

And as I wrote my friend a sincere heartfelt apology, something was bothering me.
A tiny grain of sand in my apology oyster.
Because in as much as maybe I was wrong about her, that I was sorry, that I did move forward thinking that she was  a certain way. For every shitty action on my part that I defended as a reaction to her actions, as much as I was mad at her for things "being about her", for all the crimes I accused her of, in the end, the situations did happen.

Whatever fueled them, I didn't imagine the conversations. I didn't imagine her anger, I didn't imagine her frustration, her pain, her annoyance and her reactions. Those things did happen.

I can't tell if she's saying they didn't.
But I think her position is there was more to her then that and I should have seen it, I shouldn't have judged. And that she really misjudged me .

She's right.


But I'm also not sure I can punish myself anymore over the fact that I did judge. Because in the abscence of any prior knowledge of her, without the pre, the post, without knowing her really at all, I looked at the only interactions we had.  And at the time, well, she like me, was a bitch to the florist.