Thank You for Existing In My Life женя — part2
Immense enlightenment within 1 day…
(It’s highly recommended to read part 1 to get the bigger picture )
Record steal our attention
The first thought I wake up in the morning is again “where to set up my camera to record the epic moment “meeting the person who saves my life”.
I put my canon80D on the table but since Canon80D has an embedded limitation of maximum record time 30minutes, plus I nearly used up my memory card. I need to check my camera from time to time to delete the previous file and stopped the recording so that I have enough space to record the critical moment meeting with her.
It got me so nervous and unable to focus on my work on laptop, because my brain is full of thoughts about “battery enough or not” “camera is focusing or not” “how many minutes left I need to delete the previous one”
Once I switch my attention to camera, then switch back to laptop, It usually takes me 2 minutes to reload
“where were i?”
Control what we can because life is more unpredictable than we think
женя’s worker guarantee me that женя will arrive in the early morning, so I wake up way earlier than I should and used to. But when after early morning still no one arrives, I decided to continue sleeping for a while and asked worker to remind me before her arrival so that I can set up the camera.
After I slept for a while, worker wake me up and told me женя is busy so she will come later.
I was super happy about this because I will have time to make more space in my SD card.
in retrospect: my happiness shouldn’t depend on unexpected events, I should plan ahead and clean my SD card
I was frustrated in the next hour because the worker’s words never count, so I decided to take a very short rest to prepare the most energized version of me.
However!!
“Hey! Eric what are you doing here” женя appear next to my bed
“I I I I” ( I was speechless, looking at the prettiest person smiling in front of me”
It was really funny because I slept at the upper bunk bed and we want to hug each other, i could only hug her head:))
At the end I record nothing, женя happened to appear at the period that i expect she would least likely to appear.
In retrospect: All of the efforts of trying to handle the situation is needless since the worker and I know little about her schedule.
In retrospect2:There is no point over worry that i won’t be able to record the epic moment because there are too many uncertainties in this task.
It’s good to worry because we care, but when we put too much attention on expecting it won’t or will happen, this would cause trouble.
It’s okay to let go of some “cool chances”, because if we are cool enough we could create a lot more cool memories or videos in the future.
Conscientious to the conversation
We chatted for one hour, but mostly it was just me asking her question,
Thanks to my constant practice of talking to strangers, I sensed the sign that maybe she is not interested in talking to me.
But I knew that I should not judge things too quickly so I wait.
We went for lunch. But something got wrong again.
I noticed that she put most of her attention on talking to her worker, she wasn’t curious or asking any questions about my “epic” journey, it’s weirder because she was a journalist. She has so much opportunity to ask about my life since we’ve lost connection on whatsapp for 1 month.
She did share with me some Rusisan culture, but she wasn’t paying attention to get my response.
It’s easy to sense when people are paying attention or not if we are conscientious to our surrounding.
But what makes me realized that there is indeed something that went wrong is when i ask her when will be her free time I hope we could make a video or hangout. She didn’t generate any excitement but simply just say “well I’ll be in hostel from 9 to 21, it’s hard to not find me”
So the next day, I try to ease the atmosphere, because, despite all the evidence i had about her disinterest in talking to me, I decided to give my one last try. I generated some topics that she potentially might like — I asked about her hostel. Her focus, Her interest at the moment.
But throughout our conversation, she was just behaving like a robot who tries her best to “complete the task of responding to my question”.
How I know?
I didn’t get her eye focus, She answered me with “oh cool oh nice” all the time whenever i finished sharing my experience.
I can also see and feel she is not so genuinely happy when smiling at me.
It’s always have been easy for me to sense people’s reactions, not only because i practice talking to various kind of strangers a lot but also when I am paying my 98 percent attention on her, it’s relatively easy to read people’s heart.
In retrospect: If I weren’t being conscientious to her response, emotion and the whole conversation atmosphere, I would not be able to sense the problem in our friendship, not even mention to solve the problem.
How I broke the friendship without any notice
She is being quiet all the time, even though we have a lot of personal time when we are buying food . She asked me what do I want to eat. I said food in this shop it’s too expensive for me(I didn’t check the price, but usually the more decoration the shop is the more expensive the food will be)
“OH COME ON, Don’t worry it’s on me” женя said with slight irritation
“okay…” I was sad because her reaction was sad and angry
How i can tell she was emotionally negative?
Again, by paying attention on her talking intonation and her gesture.
I asked her the most courageous, groundbreaking questions I’ve ever asked.
“женя, have I ever made you comfortable?”
I saw her hesitance.
“please don’t worry about hurting me, I really want your honesty because I can feel something went wrong.”
“Well okay then…Actually you hurt me quite a lot” (i was so surprised at that moment, even right now I am still shocked by her honesty ”
“Ohhh yes, you also criticize me too much, I understand sometimes I might do something wrongly, but that’s totally fine for me, its okay to be like this, criticism like yours really make me feel sad”
I was speechless, guilty, surprised.
I was speechless that the person I like the most has been hurting by me.
I feel guilty because I didn’t recognize any of the things that she said.
I am surprised by her courage to express all these feelings out.
So the first thing I said to her is that
“Oh my god you are so brave to express these feelings out, it must have been such pressure for you, you have been afraid of hurting me, but at the same time you still try your best to help me, why are you so kind?”
“Eric, you are also brave too! to ask this question”
I feel so warm because asking this question is indeed a challenge for me.
In retrospect: If I weren’t overcome my fear of asking this critical question, I would never have chance to care about her, to learn more about her. Never will have the chance to fix things.
I should have listened more instead of giving advice
Indeed, very often when женя was expressing her problems of building hostel to me. I thought i was doing so good that I could share with my solutions and point out the possible mistakes that she might have made. But I was wrong, my unwanted advice not only lead our friendship broken but also she was sad about my criticism.
Because I made her feel she is living wrongly.
When someone is scared, angry, depressed, or otherwise upset, the last thing they want is to feel like a burden or that something is wrong with them. by nickwignall
It’s about how we feel not how I feel
“is there more uncomfortable experience you get from me женя?”
“I feel like you expect too much from me, want too much friendliness and help from me. It’s annoying!”
I was pretty surprised because I have been trying my best to generate the least expectation, I am pretty sure I am very well in control of my behaviors and did none of the things that she said
So this got me thinking.
In introspect: It’s not about how I feel or react to the situation, after all, my words are delivering to her not to me and since people react to the same things differently, it’s possible that she would have different reaction, even in this case, an uncomfortable reaction.
False cause fallacy
However, after scrutinizing and introspect the whole “unfriendly events” multiple times. I realized the reasons that might make her feel stressful not necessarily because of me but because she was also under big stress of running her first hostel business.
Of course, I might still accidentally hurt her by being annoying just like she said. But in my point of view, she can always express her feelings out to me whenever she could, she has countless chances in the past
But she never did!
So this got me thinking.
“okay so since the fact that she is stressful is certain but what about the reasons that cause it?
“yes indeed, it’s easy to blame one person and finish the “detective task”, let one person to take all the crime
BUT
Does that mean i am the only trouble maker? Maybe I am only the 2% of the trouble maker.
Often times in our lives, when we see two phenomena regularly occur together, we would “reasonably assume that the 1st event causes the second, but actually one does not necessarily cause the other.
For example, when we’re staying in our room, door is closed, hearing our mom shouted at the kitchen, a few seconds after, our young little brother cries. Then normally we would assume that mom is the person who make our little young little brother cries. But in fact, it’s because little brother got hurt by playing toys that make him cry.
Conversation turn enemy into friend
At first, женя was expressing how she was uncomfortable with me even how she dislikes me.
But once i started to share my point of view with her
Conversation suddenly has a 180c changes.
“i understand you женя, but you never told me that you was stressed, i am sorry that i should have sensed it, and i would if i could. But if you realized that Eric keeps hurting you, maybe next time you could send a bit signal to let me know.
“Also, you are such a kind person, keep thinking of how to help me, and extremely kind that eventually your kindness backfire on you make you feel stressful”
She nodded her head.
“I gotta say женя, you are so courageous to express all these feelings out to me, normal people would just disguise, seems like you still want to be my friend?”
“Eric, I always want to be your friend, actually i already consider you as my friend”
“well женя, but i don’t want acquainted kind of friends, I want honest friends that could share the pain, i want the friends that could be vulnerable to one another, I really enjoy the moment right now we are expressing our honest feelings to one another”
“seems like we are recovering our friendship huh??”
We don’t have to be a professional psychologist to help people out
@1 Just listen is enough
She told me about how she was being so kind, supportive, friendly to her best friend but find out that her best friend didn’t pay back the same, way less.
The only thing I did is touch her shoulder when i hear her sad intonation voice.
Surprisingly she gives her resonation back, back nodding her head and say “yeah”
@ 2 Express our emotion as recognition
I had zero hesitation in showing my anger about how her best friend treats her so unfriendly and the sadness of the situation she encountered.
My straightforward emotions prompt her feelings and thoughts to tell me even more in detail.
@ 3 Ask questions, but not so much
She told me about how she spends a lot of time, energy and money flying to her best friend city, joining her wedding, but ended up discovering that her best friend pay literally no attention back to her.
I asked her: “don’t you feel sad?” “if i were you i would feel sad”
Later on she expresses more of her feelings out that might have been constraint by her ever since she felt pain.
And my mission complete just by asking her question! We all know that releasing our thoughts and emotions out its a good way to feel better.
How we recover our friendship
@1 Talk in person NOT ON INTERNET
Because if we are making a friendship on internet we cannot see how each other behaves. To be more specific, it was my observation of her hand gesture, facial expression and body position that made me realized there is something wrong in our friendship.
@ 2 Contact each other not for MAINTAINING FREQUENCY
While женя is busy with building hostel and I am busy with my preparation of hitchhike trip. We still spend so much time sending each other audio messages and since we are both workaholics, Ultimately, we reply after 1 week.
And the consequences of replying after 1 week is that I no longer feel the importance, the emotion to respond to her, instead, i feel responsibility and obligatory.
I feel stress.
The same situation happened on me right now as well, i have been hitchhiking across Russia and my mom always wants me and sort of using a threatening forcing kind of way wanting me to keep in touch with them
“Eric, you are our son, isn’t that normal you text us everyday to make us feel secure, you don’t have to text too much you can just send us a sticker, isn’t that hard? don’t make us feel insecure!”
But i didn’t follow and i rarely follow what they told me to do
Because i am confident that i text them not because to make us rely on and addicted to technology
But because we use it when we really want to, really need to.
Otherwise, i feel like texting my parents is just like taking a university attendance.
This is probably one of the reason why I dropped out from my family just like i dropped out from univeritsy.
202009 eric(naruto) Eskisehir
