One of the phrases that has caused me pain over the years is "you mean you didn't know?" Over the past several years at work I have been on the outside of the people that were on the inside was not the favored one.
I was not the preferred person. I was the one to be there when nobody else was there and work all the evening shifts and holidays that nobody else wanted to work and take all the scut work. That's what I specialize in and it's what I do best.
And I get a lot of stuff done that way things would happen at work and decisions would be made and people would come to me and tell me about it and say, you mean you didn't know for a long time? It really aggravated me until I finally decided that if they didn't tell me, it didn't have to influence what I was doing.
And if it didn't come from my bosses, then I didn't have to do it. All of a sudden, communication started happening with me a lot more because I was taking action without the latest guidance because they had left me out again.
In my home life, I had that happen often when I would talk to my mother and she would be commenting on something that other family members were doing, and I would say, oh, I didn't know that in a very casual way.
And she would say, "you mean you didn't know?". In a tone that made it seem like I should have known and that I was a bad person because I didn't know. I felt a lot of guilt and a lot of pain from being left out.
And I was left out of some pretty major things in our family. Surgeries, naming, job changes, moves, new addresses, all sorts of things. I even had to come up with a formula that I told people in my family to use.
The formula is: Telling my wife does not equal telling me was the formula.
My kids thought that was pretty funny, but nobody else inside my family got the joke. It's almost as if they didn't understand why I needed to know any of that stuff.
But the feelings of being left out and ostracized and not even thought of or considered were amplified by things that I was going through at work and in my personal life and led to a lot of guilt and hurt from it. Which was usually expressed as anger.
I've learned to cope with it. I've learned to adapt to not knowing things. I've taught myself to be perpetually surprised at what I encounter, to say, "oh" Instead of "I didn't know", to watch and listen and not have to know.
And I've learned to turn the guilt away so that I don't accept any responsibility for stuff that wasn't shared with me. Always before I would feel responsible, but I've learned and adapted. And if I really need to know something, I'll ask about it.
But what I've learned is that I really don't need to know any of that stuff.
