Friendship

 I think many of my posts will be on Friendship/Community. 

So today I met up with three people I didn’t know - through the same Facebook group. As I walked in the first person called Debra was confrontational and aggressive in her tone, and I really couldn’t handle the way she was speaking, so I did try to tuning out the tone and the body language, and seeing if actually, she was saying things that were okay, Nope - they were still confrontational . For example, I suddenly realised I parked outside without my disabled badge on so I said scuse me - i’ve got to check my car andI run out for a moment to sort out my car. When I came back she asked me why I needed to do something with my car and so unhappily, I felt forced into admitting that I have a disabled badge, she made a strange harrumph and some weird body language. It later came out that she dislikes people having disable badges if they can walk at all. And so she challenges people if she can’t see invisible disability. !!!! I explained that I often get challenged, and I say to people that if they know more about my medical conditions than my Doctor Who advises me to have a disabled badge, then maybe they need to talk to my doctor to explain why their opinion is better I said it in a gentle, sweet, kind tone Then the other person called Ella arrived and tried to take over the conversation totally and managed it by about 90% of the time by telling us in a very disconnected autistic way all about her various illnesses at great length in detail with very little eye contact. I live with Bill so I’m used to this and reckon she was either autistic or had ADHD or something along that spectrum , but all the same it was causing the other two people to feel kind of rejected and left out. Interestingly, I didn’t seem to mind because I think I’ve got a long history of being trampled on. I’m not saying :please shut the fuck up in the nicest possible way. I need to find a way to say that nicely. I listened for a very long time to Ella and then I turned to the third woman and said we haven’t heard anything about your life and the wonderful thing about this group on Facebook is that we meet to all share the difficulties we’re going through, so would you like to tell us how you’re doing , So the third person said that she was finding it hard because she’d left her husband, and with only those words, Ella immediately jumped in, and said that she’d left her husband, and she started telling a long story about it, and I intervened, and said actually, Ella could we let Steph finish her story about what she’s going through And because what I said, was perfectly acceptable, Ella couldn’t be outwardly directly angry at me for it, but her body language was giving out signals that she was extremely miffed. I had to do this about 10 times in 10 minutes, and eventually Steph gave up and left As soon as Steph had left, Ella, said that she was going to go home and feel awful about herself because she shouldn’t have talked so much. I immediately realised that she was guilt tripping me, but that it was almost unconscious, there was no way I was being guilt tripped, so I explained to her how to compassionately and kindly remind herself that in our common humanity we’re all trying to learn how to get on with new people, and that we all sometimes need to find ways to adapt in the new situation And actually the group was for everybody and it’s a great way to learn and adapt by coming along to groups and meeting people. She insisted she couldn’t be compassionate to herself, and that she wished she hadn’t come. At that point, I had had enough and so I said I had to go to my Writing Group. I left the meeting feeling absolutely totally exhausted and making a mental note to myself, not turn up to that one again.