Reconsideration, in 12-point.

Every morning I reserve a few blissful moments before staggering to the shower to sit and drink a glass of orange juice and focus my eyes on the scrolling words of my computer as I check my email and the little circuit of websites I visit regularly. Nothing important…I save the news and the sports scores for my plan time because I really haven’t found much about my job that requires actual planning yet. Maybe that’s something I should ask about at some point.

A couple days ago, one of the bloggers I read regularly—a guy I know in real life—wrote an exquisite entry about a beautiful girl he’s encountered at his school, how he’s utterly drawn to her, how he’s flummoxed by his behavior around her, and how part of this immense attraction is his desire to connect…to acknowledge how striking she is, and then to beg her forgiveness for an intrusion upon her insecurities and pain. It was poignant and raw, perfectly composed, and of an emotional depth that I find rare in the world.

So I shocked myself when my first reaction was to hurl an expletive at the screen and hit my fist on the keyboard…a futile cyber-substitute for slamming a door on the face of an offensive person.

My day was ruined after that, and I arrived at school already on a mission to be a holy terror. I yelled at my classes, which made me doubly mad because I never, ever raise my voice with kids. I slumped at the lunch table and scowled at the Wisterias, my disdain for them practically a blinking neon sign over my head as I slammed forkfuls of rice into my mouth and glared at their yogurt cups and Diet Cokes. I tried checking his blog again to see if maybe it was a fluke, an aberration of instinct, but I had the same reaction the second time around, so I stomped out of the building with my jaw clenched and burst into tears the moment I hit my car. I came home, pulled my comforter over my head and hid there for a few hours, afraid to subject anyone else to my toxic anger.

While I was ensconced in my down feather and cotton igloo, I tried to make some sense of the absolute rage that blog entry had inspired. I’m in the middle of reading this book about Buddhist meditation and health philosophy that says the emotions that pass in and out of us each day are only harmful if we ruminate over them (duh) and that in order to attain the sort of peace we struggle for in our lives, we should allow the emotions to run their course, acknowledge them, and move on. Unfortunately, how to actually DO the latter part of that philosophy is in Chapter 8 and I’m only on, like, Chapter 4 so I still feel like I have a license to pick apart and overanalyze every weird feeling I have. Ergo, I obsessed.

I had to rule a few things that weren’t the cause before I could really get to the root of the problem. Was I offended by the quality of his writing? Absolutely not. In the world of amateur blogging, this one is definitely worth the bandwidth. Did I have some completely out-of-the-blue, latent feelings for this guy and so I was hurt by his florid writing about another girl? Nope. We have an easy acquaintanceship based around good discussions over Very Important Things and some not so important things, and if I had to pigeonhole our friendship, he would’ve been filed away in the “Buddy” section, along with my college housemates and Daryl, the guy who worked in electronics at Wal-Mart with me this summer.

What I finally figured out, after three hours of bedroom navel gazing, was that the writer essentially hit upon a subject that is basically my Achilles’ Heel: the subjects of physical attraction and the human need to be wanted.

I have been, during the days in which I wasn't able to bring myself to blog, taking yet another round of personal inventory following a conversation with one of my best friends. He declared me "overnice" and said he noticed I got pushed around a lot and didn't say much back in return. One morning...I think the morning before my last round of strep started simmering in the hot, steamy netherpoints of my tonsular region...I woke up and decided I was done being nice. Or at least done being so nice that I was afraid to speak my mind. So I started telling people things that needed to be said, and I felt better with every one.

So when I got angry by this post, I instantly decided I needed to talk about it so I could get over it and feel better, and you could understand maybe that I DO do more things than just smile and get out of people's way. When I realized this, my writer’s block was broken and I wrote. I wrote for two straight hours, filled up three and a half pages of a Word document, and even snuck it in in an attachment to my school email so I could write more during my plan time. And when I sat back, ready to copy and paste my mini-manifesto into the entry-starved white box on my Blogger homepage, I realized that none of this…absolutely none of it at all really resolved the situation. It didn’t help me feel better, and I decided that hashing out exactly why I felt such hostility for a friendly acquaintance who couldn’t even possibly know he had done anything wrong—who DIDN’T do anything wrong other than unwittingly write really coherently about something at which I’m an utter failure—would just plunge us both into a level of awkwardness into which even I would not dare go. I thought I would derive some sort of sweeping life lesson out of my printed screed…that if I could make my own feelings about the subject as tangible as his, then somehow saying the potentially hurtful things I wanted to say would’ve been acceptable.

So as I watched two of the three pages of words being consumed by my backspace button, I realized the inherent lesson in all of it was that sometimes actually, things are just better left unsaid.