Living with groundlessness

[AntoniaB]

Well. He did contact me back to say thank you for caring and I didn't need to worry about him (I never said I was worried) and didn't say he didn't want the help but didn't say he didn't...it was more like he just threw his hands up, told me one thing he was doing to "get through the day", and then he made some jokes about how I'd feel differently when I went back to work after the sabbatical or said that I must have a good drug supplier, then he said "ONLY KIDDING, don't get mad."

The joking means I touched a nerve. It's what he does when I get too close to home.

So I emailed back and tried to explain some of the changes I made in my own thinking to turn from being a pessimistic thinker into an optimistic one, and then said look, I'm just putting this out there, if you take it to heart you do, if you don't, you don't.

Then I sent the email and realized something with shocking clarity: this is the second time in our lives we had this discussion. This is the SAME conversation in general that was our first. The only change is we were talking about BEING students then, in college, and I was looking at college as this open field of grand possibility, and he was poking fun at my optimism and saying I was naive, and college and being a student was just boring, and pointless, and the only thing that mattered was being "off" from school, having fun, and I was arguing "NO! There is so much more out there!"

The SAME conversation. 23 years later. If any of you have seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you'll know how true that movie is in some ways...

I guess the only difference is that this time around I think "nah....your words fall on deaf ears...he's doomed." where the other time I was like "I CAN CHANGE HIM!!!"