I spoke with my accountability buddy earlier and it helped me see my life from a different angle. For this book-writing group, we have been assigned an accountability buddy and I wasn’t sure how it would go—as I don’t like to be told to work harder, I yell at myself enough for that—and was pleasantly surprised. He helped me reflect on how sometimes I may hurt people without realizing it.
I’m thinking back through my life and I remember the times when people have broken my heart. Falling in love and having the girl break up with me. I think having a girl lie to me about being pregnant. Getting rejected from certain colleges or job opportunities. In this moment, I pause and ask whether those people knew how much what they did hurt me.
I ask this because I often don’t know how much I’ve hurt others. I was talking with a girl earlier today and I commented on a photo of her baby and she said, “It could have been our baby.” It confused me to hear this, as, I wasn’t sure she liked me that much. I mean, I had my ideas about it, but at one point she blocked me on the phone and stopped talking to me for months. Her saying this today, especially after the conversation I had earlier, made me wonder how much pain I may have caused this girl.
I think I often overlook how much women have liked me. Perhaps it comes from a place of me feeling insecure for many of my years about my physical appearance, about my bank account, my sense of fashion, or many other things. I just often didn’t think women liked me. Or maybe I just didn’t read the signs—that they would be very indirect about it and for me, I would assume no instead of assuming yes.
When I pause and reflect on the qualities I like about myself—learning quickly, connecting quickly, talking about almost anything with anyone—I realize that maybe I’ve been wrong. And then I start to think about all the women I may have hurt that may not have said it to me but definitely felt it. The ones who wanted an exclusive relationship with me. The ones who wanted to marry me. The ones who wanted me to say to them, “I love you.”
I feel a bit embarrassed and frustrated with myself for not seeing it. Even more, I feel sad that I could have brought so much pain to people without knowing it. While I believe it wasn’t my intention, it still may have brought deep pain, that perhaps some of them still carry with them, as I carry other unresolved pain within me.
To all of those women out there who I may have hurt, raised expectations and dropped out of the picture, or overlooked, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you and yet, sometimes, it doesn’t matter.
