"You Just Gotta Understand." (I Do. And...)

So much - as per usual - is going through my head. So many thoughts. So many ideas. It is just one big traffic center.

Sometimes I don't know where, or how, to begin to share what is rattling around in there.

One of the things that is very much present for me is how lately it seems that people more than usual are telling me about how another might be feeling in relation to me and my situation. "Well, you gotta consider..." "Well, you gotta understand..."

Pretty much every time something like that is said, I already know what they're going to say. Odds are they are saying it in the hope that somehow, perhaps, I might feel better having the perspective. Well. It doesn't really help.

As a matter of fact, it often is something that winds up denying my side of things. It denies how I feel. *I* am the one that has to understand that very few people get me, my perspective, my situation, how I feel. I have to understand that, and that is supposed to help.

Um. Well. Nope.

You see, even though I understand my doctor's dismay at my choices, even though I understand why people don't interact with me, even though I understand why people choose to say things the way they do, I still feel the way I do. I still am making the choices that I feel fit me. I am still in need of financial support. My circumstances do not change with my understanding of what others think and feel. And neither do my feelings. AND, more importantly, they shouldn't have to. Somehow in what others say there often - especially in cases like this - is an implicit idea that what I feel, I shouldn't.

There is someone I talk to fairly regularly who has been working a lot. As a result, our time to speak has been cut down considerably, and the person is often not in the best mood when we talk. The other day I said, "I hate your job." That person came back with a number of things about the job, and seemed to be quite offended by my statement. My response was that I could understand and appreciate all those things AND still hate the job for how it has affected things between us.

We seem to often think that so much has to be an either/or. We don't always seem to be able to tolerate things somewhere in the middle, or co-existing. I wish it was that simple sometimes, but it unfortunately very rarely, if ever, is.

As I write about this, it occurs to me that this is something that, as often is the case, can fit into many different types of circumstances. Even you can likely experience the same type of thing I have described. If I am right, you know just how annoying and frustrating it can be.