I am a strong willed person when I want to be. And I say this not to boast of some sort of achievement for which I am proud, not that I regret being so anyway. But as a pretext to the story I am about to share into a journey I made into re-discovering myself and how others perceived me.
The difficulty with being a rather strong-willed person especially on those I interact with socially never hit me until it did, in a setting rather not of the social kind. At least not for me. Or maybe I was just being paranoid. Let me explain.
I had been speaking over the phone with a friend with whom I had not met for a while. She was rather so withdrawn a character that our conversations would have seemed to a third-party observer as an irksome monologue suffered at the hands on over-enthused speaker to an audience that was little less than outrightly bored. And until now I never realized that he might have been right. All her answers were in phrases and sentences not exceeding four or five words. And being as optimistic as I have always thought myself to be, I was fully assured that I could woo her into conversing freely with her thoughts ebbing out generously instead of spurting out sporadically like water from a hand-powered borehole. It seemed an interesting enough challenge to step up to. So I did.
But one would be excused to say that I failed – phenomenally. She had proved so far, with ‘so far’ spanning the length of a year’, to be impregnable to change. I had gone so long without effecting any visible change that I gave up all hope, abandoning the self-assigned project altogether and subsequently forgetting about it.
And I did forget for a long time, until that day when she had passed a comment that I failed to hear on the first attempt of its articulation. And upon asking her to repeat it, I received a polite dismissal claiming that it was ‘nothing to bother about.’ I was then, unknowingly, on the brink of making an important discovery as long as our friendship was concerned.
But I wasn’t ready to let go of it just yet, and for good reason too – getting her to repeat it, seemed not just an opportunity to hear what she said but also one that would demand, as crazy is it were, more engagement from her. However, the only engagement I received was in the form of a long string of rejections that became for more emphatic with each request. Yet I pushed on till a minor irritation grew steadily into what seemed to be the budding of a slightly bridled, yet visible, anger. Needless to say, I backed down to the obvious and immediate relief of the other party.
I dismissed it with a half-baked reason,which on hindsight seems very illogical, that I was simply reading too much into ordinary goings-on. That was until yesterday, when the very same scenario played itself out again, almost verbatim. And now I really am at a loss as to what to think though I do have a few incongruous theories of my own.
Prominent among this ‘list’ of theories, is the very painful but yet growingly popular idea that maybe, just maybe, there might be an element of my behavior that creates some sort of repulsion between moi and distinguished members of the opposite sex. Without seeming to be self-effacing I have objectively, for want of a better word, identified this element as my eccentric reaction to life in general. Or as my dear mother adroitly words it, “the immaturity that is unbecoming of your age, giving indication of my body out-growing your mind.” Too harsh? Maybe, but hearing the same complaint for over a year helps makes it easier to overlook it altogether. Right?
As to the rest on my list of ‘incongruous theories’, I leave them to another day’s work. Until then, au revoir mes amis.
