Telling someone off part 2 (the morning after)

Here's what happened the morning after I told someone off:

The next morning, Bob approached me in the kitchen.

“I didn’t get a chance to talk to you last night but I wanted to apologize for ‘barking’ at you yesterday,” he said to me privately as I washed the breakfast dishes.

I laughed at his joke with affection for the cleverness and sweetness of him, but I also started to freak out. I worried about what I should be saying, how I could avoid this unexpected interaction, how I could appease this conflict between us that I had unintentionally started.

“I didn’t mean to…” he started.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I know you didn’t mean to… It was just how I was feeling at the time so I said it…”

“There are a lot of ways to communicate things and I could have communicated that differently. I just wanted to slice the bread,” he explained.

“And that was what was great,” I said. “You just took the bread and sliced it,” I said.

But honestly,I had no idea what I was saying. I was scared. We were discussing the fact that I had told him that he made me feel like a dog. I didn’t mean to say that he made me feel like a dog, it was just how I had felt. And now, here we were, him apologizing to me and I was confused about what to do with this. Yesterday had been so clean, I had just been present in the moment, but now I had to be present to him, and I didn’t know how.

Because what I really wanted to do was appease the situation, make it go away, just stop this genuine interaction between us. It was unfamiliar territory for me and I wanted to go back to the easier stuff between us, where there was no room for conflict, where there were clear boundaries of power and roles. I desperately wanted to fall right back into my role: apologize for bringing it up, assure him that he hadn’t hurt me, defer my needs to his in an attempt to make myself easy and pleasant so that he would stay around.

But I didn’t do this. I knew that what had “worked” yesterday was being present to the moment. I knew that this bizarre interaction between us in which I had genuinely shared my feelings with him had come from me being present, not from trying to manipulate the situation.

So I didn’t manipulate. I just stood there, in silence, because I didn’t have anything else to say. He went back to making his coffee and I almost lingered, almost stayed in that part of the kitchen so that I could apologize or thank him or do something to make him not feel apologetic, not feel bad for having said what he said.
But instead, I tried to be present to myself. I tried to feel what I was feeling, instead of what I was thinking. When I felt what I was feeling, I realized that I wasn’t actually feeling sorry for what I had said. And though I felt bad that he was feeling bad, I knew that that was coming from a place of wanting to change the situation instead of accepting it. It was motivated more by my feelings of feeling bad for making him feel bad, than from a genuine place of compassion.

So I stayed present to the moment. At that moment, being present meant getting the other dishes and bringing them to the sink, so I did.

It was awkward for the rest of the morning. I read into everything and worried that he would be reading me too. I frequently tried to spend more or less time with him to let him know that I wasn’t upset with him or that I forgave him or whatever but then I kept telling myself to just be present. At that point, being present meant letting go of what had happened between us that morning as easily as I had let go of what had happened between us the night before. It wasn’t easy, it still isn’t, but I’m sticking with being present and letting us be. It’s what worked yesterday. I can’t say if it’s going to “work” in the future, but I’m sticking with it for now.