It’s you, not me.

What I intended to say to one of my best friends was less tactful than I had planned, but a lot more tactful than I meant. I planned to say, apropos of the many things it seems to me that she is misinterpreting and my advice: “The thing is, you’re a doer, and I’m an observer…” and then I would lead gently into the glaring truth that maybe she’s so busy trying to make things happen that she doesn’t notice the undercurrents (as someone who can’t really be bothered to make things happen, I have plenty of time for undercurrents, and sound opinions thereof). What I said, somewhat snappishly, was: “I’m a much better judge of character than you, and I’d trust my reading of a situation over yours any day”. What I could have said (and it may still burst out one day) was: “Do you think you’re in the middle of a nervous breakdown? Because we think you’ve completely fucking lost it. Would you like an intervention, because some of us are rapidly getting over our Britishness about such things, and we’re about ready to deliver one?”

And then the same day I had an idea of startlingly brilliant creativity, and expounded upon this to one of the people I needed to make it happen. This then led into a conversation about something I had written that made me mentally write the words WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? WHY DON’T YOU GET IT? On a mental piece of paper, and place it under another one which said NOT EVERYONE HAS TO GET EVERYTHING YOU WRITE, YOU SELF-OBSESSED FUCKWIT. But I still carried on a mental (I choose my words with care) conversation with myself in which I admitted that he might have had a point and maybe I could push myself a bit harder and also found myself thinking that it was clearly foolish to try to have sensible conversations with people at four o’clock in the morning when they were so addled by sleep they had NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE SAYING, and ANYWAY he was just saying he loved my writing because he wanted to get into my pants. Even if he was in my pants, and appeared to be saying he didn’t like this particular piece of writing.

The next day when I was recounting this to someone else, leaving out most of my internal ravings, I said I couldn’t understand why he didn’t see that it was about risk, and falling in love, and… “Oh,” she said, “I thought it was about something completely different.”

I’m still pretty sure that it’s all of them, and not me.