Misplaced Gratitude

Sitting in the waiting room at the hospital I am thinking about a question I was sent by a young man who has moved cities to start a new job and feels that none of his co-workers like him.

He writes that however cheery and pleasant he is he remains an outsider and convinced that people are talking about him behind his back.

He tells me that he imagines, as a gay man, that it’s to do with his sexuality. He has experienced such bigotry all of his life.

It’s turning around in my mind because hospitals are a place where I always feel deep gratitude for the kindness of strangers, something the young man is not experiencing at all.

This morning, even the incessant wittering of a woman talking to her friend two meters on the diagonal away from me about how her son chews Lego pieces into long strips is irritating me less than it normally would.

I resist the temptation to suggest she uses the long strips of Lego to tie his hands behind his back so he can’t put any more of it in his mouth.

I begin to draft a response to the man without any friends before my pupils dilate to such an extent that I am unable to see my notebook.

I tell him two stories.

The first is about a garage I used because it was close to my home.

I told him that the owner was always grumpy and rude and the grumpier and ruder he became the nicer I was.

It got to the point where I would feel anxious about booking my car in, taking it to the garage, and even paying the bill.

The more grandiose he became, the more shameful I was.

Then I told the man about a young guy I see most mornings while I am walking the dog.

Each day I smile and nod a greeting, but he just looks at me blankly.

One morning, to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, I said a breezy, “Morning.”

Nothing.

I wrote in my reply that the only way we can feel “less than” in front of someone else is if we agree to do a debilitating dance in which, through hurting at their disrespect for us we come to feel less for ourselves.

I stopped going to the garage, and I no longer try for a response from the young man, and I feel much better for it.

In the hospital, the doctor is giving my eye a thorough examination.

“I expect you’ll remember this from before,” he tells me as he takes out what appears to be a precision screwdriver.

I definitely don’t remember this from before.

I can’t see what he’s doing but it feels as if he is pressing the pointy end of a precision screwdriver increasingly hard into my eye socket.

“Sorry, it gets a bit uncomfortable towards the nose,” he tells me.

“It’s absolutely fine,” I breathe heavily through my mask as the discomfort increases.

Nothing, apparently, can shake my feeling of gratitude, even having my eye poked with a screwdriver.

It turns out that he is right about getting near the nose because, as he does, I begin to feel quite hot and hope that I’m not going to faint.

It’s funny, I think to myself just before my eye is watering so badly that I can’t see anymore, how tolerant we can be of pain inflicted upon us when we know it comes from a place of care and support, but how hard it is sometimes to see the difference between that and ignorance.