A week or so ago, I made a proposition to an old friend. Actually it’s more like granting her request. She is not really that old and we haven’t been friends that long, but I suspect we have known each other longer than either one of us would like to believe. I told her I would do something she has been asking me to do for a good while now, but me being a contrarian means I don’t make things easy for anyone, least of all the people who push me the most.
I told her I would start sharing my rants with more than just her, for a year, hopefully on a daily basis although I am making no promises.
I am sure she thinks this is a good thing, a step in the right direction. But the contrarian in me suspects she might have an ulterior motive or two. I think she figures that will keep me around for another year and too busy to torture her, which will be a good thing for her gut. She doesn’t have the sturdiest gut at this point but that’s partly my fault, I fully admit.
So as someone once said, be careful what you ask for, my friend. Sometimes you actually do get what you want. Because the universe does have a sense of humor and sometimes the universe is generous. I hope you won’t regret what you are asking of me this time.
Because sometimes, when you ask for something, you get more than you bargained for. Aren’t you glad you made that phone call all those years ago to ask for my help?
All you wanted was to save a snotty dog.
The last thing I wanted or needed was yet another dog to save.
In the end, the dog got saved and you were annoyed; annoyed that I didn’t make life easier for you. I guess you hadn’t yet figured out that was not my job.
And little did you know then that, one day, you might be asked to try to save the dog saver. I am not sure why you would think I would make that job easy. That’s the nature of the optimist I guess.
For reasons that I still don’t know, you decided long ago, that saving humans was not your calling. There was a time when I thought it might have been mine. Luckily I figured out I was wrong before I got those all important letters after my name and moved on to creatures that are much easier and more rewarding to save: dogs. I got more than I bargained for too.
I tried to warn you, I really did. But you were hell bent on saving that snotty dog. And I am sure you never for a second suspected this would end up being about more than “just a dog.”
Correction, Crazy One: I didn’t think saving people was my mission because I had a wise therapist who helped divest me of such grandiosity and who instilled in me, as a therapist, the understanding that my job was to help people save themselves. Well, he wouldn’t have said “save”, he would have said “help people help themselves”.
My problem was and I guess still is that when I retired from the profession, MY 9 year old inner self reared her neurotic head and I was right back to feeling the need to save the most needy from death and misery, but most urgently from DEATH.
And then that snotty Rottie waltzed in. YOU were the single person recommended to me as the one who would know what to do, the one who would help. How was I to have any idea that we would end up like this, fused in a (neurotic dance, and that’s being generous) of Savior and yet to be Saved, and that you would be relentless in trying to show me that these roles were not assigned in the way I thought they were.
That’s the problem with those wise therapists. They are pretty good about telling your “grown up” self what you should be doing and thinking. But they don’t always have much of a clue what to do with the less placable younger versions of ourselves. They are the ones you have to convince to get with the program.