My friend MD says I am a ‘dangerous and powerful’ person amongst our social group – and I have always put this down to his ridiculous innate paranoia! He bases this assessment on the fact that people seem to tell me things. I have no idea why – I would like to think it is cos my friends find me trustworthy and know they can rely on me for a frank and honest opinion on just about any topic. I always try to give people an objective opinion and I know for a fact that some of my friends rely on me being brutally honest with them from time to time. Even though I usually try to be tactful and diplomatic, it can often come across as harsh or uncaring. Naturally, this causes some people to flee when they hear things they dont want to.
Anyway, its true – people do tell me things, and while I am happy to help when someone needs a sympathetic ear for the regular ‘my boyfriends’ a prat’ speech, but lately it’s been going a bit far. I had a situation last night, where a friend (a recently revealed closet Drama Queen) who is in the middle of a relationship breakup called me saying that she was desperately unhappy and could I come over because her mother (who is in Sydney) was concerned she was ‘going to do something stupid’, and (her mother) was going to call the police if DQ hadn’t gotten someone over to talk to within the next 10 minutes. 😐
Firstly – “Good one Mom!” for buying into the bullshit! Secondly – Where do people get off dumping suicidal tendancies on me! And this isn’t even the first time it has happened. After ascertaining that DQ was largely trying to manipulate me into rushing over so she could spend the next few hours crying at me. I made a rather harsh call and told her that if she was seriously thinking about hurting herself or someone else, that she needed to call for professional help – that I am neither qualified, skilled nor knowledgeable enough about such things to assist. As I am not in a position where I would feel comfortable providing the level of support she required, I was therefore not prepared to accept responsibility for failing should I attempt to help her.
Well didn’t that cause a massive silence down the phone line… followed by a massive backpedal – ‘It’s not that bad, I’m not crazy or anything you know.’ Blah Blah Blah. So we went from being suicidally upset to reassuring me she is sane and coping okay. Good grief. I wanted to call the ‘Boy’ in question and make him deal with it. A kinda a “You broke it – You fix it” sort of thing, and for crying out loud, leave me the hell out of it. But luckily for him, I felt sorry for him and didn’t call.