“Oh so you’re this nice?, I thought you hated me at first, I thought you were mean”
If I had a dollar anytime someone who later became my friend told me this, I would be a billionaire. I won’t even deny it all because I so understand what they mean. I’m not very much vocally expressive around people that I’m not friends with. But one thing about me is that my face will do the talking. I know this is why most people think I hated them because even when my mouth was shut, my face probably gave a whole speech.
Say my face really said everything, why would they think I hated them? This brings me to how I define quality conversation. For me, quality conversation is a vocal expression between two or more people about how they honestly feel and think using the right words and at the right time. Oh and the end result is clarity. In my case, there were no words involved in the first place so of course, there was always serious confusion.
Let me talk about this particular friendship with this person. It started so rough, I mean very rough. We would both have things to say to each other but instead of saying them, we would keep them to ourselves. For me, I’m not one who likes to assume for people but for this particular person, I kept on assuming the worse case scenario. “Oh maybe, this person sees me as a bother, maybe this person wants nothing to do with me… “ I could go on and on.
I know it wasn’t a great thing to do but in my defense, I started thinking of that because of a comment I heard from the person one time. There was this particular day that I just came to a conclusion that alright, enough is enough. I’m going to confront this person. The worse thing that could happen was to hear “yeah, I want nothing to do with you”. Guess what? All that I had been assuming were so wrong.
We had a healthy conversation and it happened that I was also doing certain “questionable” things. However I felt, the person felt the same thing too. At that point, everything sounded so funny to the both of us and we laughed a lot about our actions. From that day, we decided to always be honest and vocally expressive to each other about whatever and however we thought or felt. I’m so glad I took that bold step because it’s been a really beautiful friendship since then.
I am a big fan of healthy conversations. I think it’s the only way I can take a trip to your mind and for me, that’s a really beautiful thing to do. I mean so far as I haven’t been gifted with the “spirit of mind reading” that’s the only way. For my facial expressions talking even when she hasn’t been asked to, hmm. I’m working on it. Slow but sure, I’ll get there.
Image is mine
