Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall
I spent the majority of this work week slaving over the agenda and slide show for a team building event that I was charged with creating and running for my department. It was exhausting and stressful at the wire, but it was also rewarding and a too-rare opportunity to be creative. Tonight, now that it's over, I'm mulling over the way it ran, the things that were said, the things that were revealed in this exchange and collaboration of sorts between eight professionals.
I had written several months ago about simpatico, about how addicting I find it when I sense some level of unexplained yet very deep affinity with someone. I have also mused about my inner radar or meter, which I faithfully trust to gauge people and their characters, for lack of a better descriptor. I'm spookily intuitive; my posse views this as impressive and something akin to a psychic gift. I find it a burden more often than not, because I usually see the inevitable outcome long before it arrives, which spoils any enjoyment I might wring from the preponderance of vapid but vaguely entertaining people that ebb and flow in my life. I am so rarely wrong about someone that I honestly cannot recall the last time it happened. My gut speaks Truth, and I heed it as consistently as I can. Sometimes I don't heed it quickly enough, but I thought I had learned the hard way to heed the klaxon call when something malevolent or abusive hoved into view.
Lately I think my gut has gone south, though. I suspect I have been wildly wrong about someone, someone who's proving to be that rare conundrum - completely confounding and unsolvable, which I find perplexing, frustrating, and unsettling. The most troubling thing about being wrong about this Puzzling Person? It's the eerie similarities between PP and me. If I am wrong about PP, it stands to reason I might be wrong about me, too. (Nothing startling there; I've been wondering about my disturbingly solid ability to self-delude myself for months now, but this would be pretty convincing proof that my Inner Barometer is fully on the fritz. I don't think they have repair folks for this in the Yellow Pages.)
I guess the harshest evidence that I am wrong about Puzzling Person's veracity is her/his ability to disconnect from reality -- their own, the collective reality of those around them, the reality of politely providing a response to communication from others. Perhaps my deepest ire is being ignored, and PP wins the Echo Chamber award multiple times in a single day and has for months now. I would hope I could never be so detached (at best) or cruel (at worst). Watching PP pick and choose when to participate in the event today, calculating at times, ruthless later in the day ... I was disappointed and then depressed.
I can't blame today's eclipse for my funk. I think I've know for months that PP is not the peer I'd hoped to find. And if observing PP is like looking in a mirror? I'm not a very considerate person.