I Pathologically Can’t Tell a Straightforward Truth
I decided I didn’t want to take piano lessons because I feel my instructor has become fascinated with me and it makes me a little nervous. Especially when he’s become fond of touching me and massaging my lower back in a friendly fashion during the lesson, and asking a lot of questions about my personal life. I’m also having trouble because he’s not teaching in a way that works around my unique sensory perception/memory issue. Our last lesson was very tense, with me being frustrated about the way he was teaching, and also freaked out that he was trying to get into my head.
So I dreaded Tuesday, the day of my lesson more and more, until finally last night I made a decision that I would not go to my piano lesson, even though I forfeit $70 that I’d already prepaid. I would rather lose the money than go. So I realized I had to cancel, but as I started writing an email to my instructor saying that work had just gotten busy so I wouldn’t be able to take lessons for a while, I realized that writing all this via email would make it seem suspicious, like I was just afraid of going because last week’s lesson was awkward. I knew I would have to call, but then I worried that an excuse of being really busy working overtime might cover not being able to schedule lessons in the short term, but he might ask me to schedule in a couple of months or he might check in with me periodically, thus delaying the ending of this relationship. So I decide that I’m going to tell him that I’m quitting my job which he knows I’m often frustrated with, and that everything is going to be up in the air from now on so I don’t want to commit to lessons.
So I call him and I’m so glad to get his answering machine. I start telling the machine how my work situation is really, really up in the air right now because I’m pretty sure I’m going to quit my job by the end of this month because I just can’t stand my boss, and so I’m working overtime to finish up all of my current projects so that I can get out of here clean next month. So I’m saying how I just won’t be able to make my lesson today or schedule more, he picks up and goes, “Julia? I want to talk to you about this but I can’t focus the way I want to because I have a friend here and have to finish up this conversation first. But I’ll call you right back.”
So we hang up and I think, “Shit.” Now I have to keep my story straight AND have to do this whole act from the beginning again.
So he calls me back and I go into my barely contained panic as I tell him that I just can’t stay at my job anymore because it’s become too ridiculous and how I’m probably going to leave at the end of next month, but I don’t know where I’m going to go and if I’m even going to stay in Los Angeles because I can’t stand this city either. He tells me it seems like I have a lot going on and I told him that I’ve been needing to quit this job for a while, and things just came to a head. And how I have two mortgages and I don’t know how I’m going to handle those, but I’m just going to do what I need to do, whether I get another job, do some traveling or move out of this city. He tells me that he hopes that I will revisit the lessons at a later time and not to hesitate to let him know if I need anything from him. And then he asks me, “I remember our very interesting conversation during the last lesson, where you divulged some private information about yourself.” Oh holy shit, he’s bringing it up (I had explained to him how my brain works. How people thought I had problems with my hearing but I realized later in life that I have trouble comprehending spoken word unless I can envision it in writing. So throughout the years, I’ve developed the ability to hear words, immediately translate them into text and flash them like subtitles so that I can read what was said. That’s why people with accents mess me up…I mispell words. Or that’s why if your name is something weird that I can’t spell, then I can’t imagine it as text and I’ll never remember your name. Because I never “saw” it and can’t retrieve the text when I want to say it. So we had a conversation because he teaches me songs by ear, but won’t write them down as sheet music which makes it had for me to memorize without a visual record to go with it). Anyway, I didn’t want to talk about it because that lesson had made me uncomfortable, and so I just started talking about how my brother’s autistic and maybe my brain is programmed differently so it processes things differently, and it got into this discussion I couldn’t get out of. So I would pause, hoping he would wrap up the call, but he would just let the silence hang, until I reiterated that I had a lot going and didn’t have room for lessons. This started up another conversation where he found out my age and was telling me that in Chinese, the character for “crisis” is made up of the character for “danger” and the character for “opportunity.” This is interesting because I had a feeling of deja vu. I feel like someone was just telling me that, but I don’t know whom. So I said again that I would be really busy with so many things up in the air, and then paused, hoping he would wrap up the call, but he just let the silence hang. This time, I as resolute not to be the first to speak and continue this conversation so finally he let me go.
Okay.
Yes, I admit, a stronger person would have just said, hey, I don’t want to take piano lessons anymore because I just don’t feel like it’s working out, or if you’re really daring, you can say, I just feel uncomfortable.
Yet, I create this whole emotional event that I’m going through that involves potentially a move out of Los Angeles, maybe some soul-searching, but definitely two mortgages that may or may not get paid but I just have to do this right now because I’m going to kill my boss if I don’t, and because of my life being so traumatic and up in the air right now, I can’t take piano lessons anymore.
Sometimes when I get really scared, this is how I hide.
I make up crazy stories that could be true in a future or slightly modified reality, just to avoid saying, you made me uncomfortable. You made me scared.
I wonder what’s so scary about openly acknowledging someone who has gotten too close to you and scared you. I wonder what happens when you acknowledge someone who is presenting unwanted intimacy.