Intaglio

He’s just observed a truth I think I'm doing a decent job of concealing.  He’s wrapped it with a reasonable dose of compassion yet I still experience its sting.  I hadn’t realized how transparent I’m being, and what burns more than anything is the idea that I am inadvertently hurting him; I may be driving him away, and this could possibly be more than I can bear.  While I acknowledge he’s right, telling him I’m working on it, I can hear the impatience in his voice.  It’s like he’s wondering what I’ve been doing all this time, why I haven’t fixed this yet.

I’m reading about the root cause of yelling.  The author of this particular piece says yelling is about our inability to deal with our own feelings of frustration, fear or being overwhelmed.  It’s about attempting to feel heard, and at the same time woefully ineffective at helping us actually be heard.  And I can’t help but think about the impossibly difficult climb I’ve made up this mountain over the last several years, coming close to eradicating this invasive disease.

When we’re really open to the feedback others give us about what’s holding us back, whether it’s a potentially career limiting behavior at work or marring our relationships in life, and decide to work on making a change,  we need real life experience to operationalize the change.  This is how we take the big idea we want to embrace and actually start living it.  Many promising, even groundbreaking concepts have died on the table because no one did the hard work to fold them into daily life. 

Although the product we’re developing at the office is still basically in the womb, we’re watching it as it shapes into our baby, almost as a mother looks at her developing fetus through an ultrasound.  And we’re also beginning to think about how we will infuse this tool into the way we deliver our services.  We know the change will be unsettling for many and take time to embrace, just as even the most coveted of newborns disrupts a household. How are we forever altered as that new baby becomes part of how we live?  There is no amount of training or pre-work that will prepare us for the experience of motherhood.  We need to live it.

I think about how communication in my home has changed from yelling to open, honest, even vulnerable dialogue.  I make a concerted effort every time a potentially explosive situation presents itself.  I ask myself who I’m upset with, me or the one I’m yelling at?  I vocalize this process over and over again so my kids learn it too. And over time yelling diminishes, becoming the exception, not the rule.  We’ve come up with phrases we’re trained to use with each other which after years of practice immediately diffuse an escalating situation.  But for this to happen, we need to live it, to operationalize the approach, to make it the way we love, not just some big idea sitting on a shelf to be pulled off and somehow work magic when we need it.

And so when I think about this truth he’s exposed, I’m not defensive about why it’s not yet fixed; I’m not taking his rejection personally.  What he doesn’t realize, because he’s not far enough along on his own journey yet, is this:  When we find another who will listen when we voice even the most painful of observations, digest what is said, own what’s rightfully theirs and make that conscious effort to operationalize change, this is all we could ever want in a relationship.  Not just because the fixing needs to become part of the way we love, but because as life ebbs and flows, there will always be something new to fix.