HE DESPISES ME
Emma's Diary
Oh my god, he REALLY despises me. Over the years I have imagined that people hate me, and actually, it turned out they haven’t really hated me, I may have annoyed them or got on their nerves but it wasn’t really hate. I have had employees and colleagues who have strongly disliked me too, I haven’t liked it but I could sense it. A lot of people may have had good reason as I was often impatient and unforgiving in my relentlessness. There is something realising that someone actually really despises you that is like nothing else you will ever experience. It hits hard and real and somehow unlike the other paranoid times you know it’s not a figment of your imagination or drunken paranoia. There’s something about the way a person can look at you; talk to you and respond that as a human we can sense and know without question that it is hated there. Not contempt; not dislike… hate and despise. In the past this would evoke one of two reactions. The first could be kissing ass and trying to get the person to like me, the second to get angry and have it out with them. Both were viable options before I changed my relationship with the booze.
When we examine and change our relationship with alcohol, we move on in our lives, we recover and we get better in so many ways, mentally and physically. Sometimes I don’t recognise the person I have become. Sometime however we experience an anchor, something; someone a smell or taste and we are reminded of the times we would rather forget. Being faced with people whose very presence remind us of how we used to be can be shocking and cathartic all at the same time as I would discover. Sometimes it’s not the big dramas that have gone on whilst in a drunken mess or things that are so bad that stand out etched on the brain forevermore. It’s the subtle events where we know we mishandled something, perhaps not too badly but that you know if you were faced with the same scenario today that you would behave and handle it entirely different and actually your reaction was 90% drink fuelled. It can feel sad because the aggrieved will never know you would handle it differently or the changes you have made in your life, because they despise you too much to even consider it an option.
I was faced with such a reminder a few weeks ago.Thankfully it was a party organised at the last minute so there was no opportunity to build it up too much apprehension at seeing someone who 9 years earlier I had asked to leave my wedding due to tensions with my brother. Although on the run up to the event I had a few fleeting thoughts and relived the memories, playing the still very vivid scene over in my head (just to check if I was still in the wrong), I remained calm. Several times I imagined excuses for not going but I knew this would cause more of a scene so I had to bite the bullet. Each time I have seen him (the aggrieved) in the years following my wedding we have been civil and avoided any unnecessary contact. Yet there’s something about someone’s demeanour when you know they actually hate you that stands out and as I sat at the party it was there in plan site for me to see. The facial expressions, the responses through tight lips, the contempt in the tone followed by a laugh and smile to everyone else there.
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