Trust me, I know how it sounds… “stabbed in the back.”
Hyperbolic.
Inflammatory.
Headline grabbing.
Dramatic.
But it’s true, I was recently stabbed in the back by a feather that, at the time, felt like a BC 41 Commando Knuckleduster dagger!
Ouch, Charlie, that hurt.
Here’s what happened:
A woman whom I had considered at the very least a casual friend decided to throw me “under the bus” for what I later realized was a marketing ploy to sell her product.
It hurt.
I didn’t seen it coming.
I thought we had agreed to disagree. I never spoke about it. No one would’ve even known it had happened.
I didn’t seen it coming.
It hurt.
I will not give you details. Except to say…
I didn’t see it coming.
It hurt.
I tell you this because, had it not been for my girlfriends, the ones I love and adore (because they have guts, grit, and grace), it would’ve taken me a whole lot longer to drop the drama in which I wanted to indulge myself. I wanted to wallow in indignation and “how-could-she-do-that” kind of stuff. Instead, and in large part because of my gutsy girlfriends, I made lemonade, which is code for “I talked some sense into myself and carried on.”
Oh yeah, Eleoff, then why are you writing about this now? Why are you still wallowing? Why are you still angry? Why are you still “in it”?
For those of you who may be wondering this– or if you have even one tiny mean-spirited bone in you as you read this– I invite you to please leave. I do not want to share this story with you.
I don’t want to share my lemonade with you.
For those of you who choose to stay, because maybe on some level you can relate to being blind-sided with a stab in the back (ok, now I’m actually laughing at myself and how hard it is to re-live what now seems to have been a mere bump in the arm), I just want to say this: yeah, mean stuff happens. Our feelings get hurt. Sometimes we even fall to our knees sobbing on the bathroom floor.
The important thing… the really really important thing, is what we choose to do next.
For me, I leaned on my girlfriends to keep reminding me what I knew: this wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. For heaven’s sake, it was a woman who got mired in her own shiitakes and, for whatever reason, needed to focus on me in order to make herself feel better.
As if I couldn’t handle that?
It’s amazing how we sometimes want to indulge in imagined helplessness. Which I did. Full disclosure: I became six again. I was committed to the unfairness of it all.
And then I stopped.
After all, it was but a mere feather, and like they do on those fake wrestling shows, I pretended to be knocked on my ass.
I’ve learned that I don’t do “mean” very well. I (still) don’t have a thick skin when it comes to mean girls and their high-school-style antics.
But what I’ve also learned is that I can recover quickly; I am reminded to muster up my guts, shore up some grit, and display grace, even when I’m under attack by a feather.
