Further thoughts...

Thinking about my last post...well, a great many things really, but mostly - beyond the cringing and the embarrassment and the sense that I really don't have what it takes to put another's feelings beyond mine, and that I'm really rather backwards and self-centred - there's this idea that I merely overreacted and went into a place I really didn't need to enter: it sort of reminds of this time I was with two friends and I walked into a cactus and my leg got filled with spikes; one friend pulls them out while the other winces and sucks her breath and expresses massive concern for me - except it didn't hurt, it was all fine. I was like, why are doing that, there's no pain? She thought she was being compassionate; but all she was doing was imagining. I think maybe I did the same. The friend I talked about in my last entry was fine, had reached a place of acceptance - but I wasn't able to see that, I was too wrapped up in my idea of how badly she must feel, the pain she must be in, and it was like I then created that pain and that feeling and had to experience and suffer it. Was it compassion? A part of me felt like it perhaps mirrored the process she had already been through. But then again I wasn't really feeling what she was feeling as so much of it was imagination so I dunno. Plus, of course, there was own pain in there of feeling helpless and guilty and of wrestling with my unexpressed curiosity. But what I wonder having expressed everything here and gone a bit deeper in my understanding is...perhaps maybe, in the very beginning, if I'd been truly able to see that she was okay with things, it wouldn't have hit me so hard, that, like my friend with the cactus, I put all the pain in my head, and winced, with the power of my imagination...