FireMinstrel wrote:
When I was a high school freshman, I started talking to a fellow musician in my grade. We seemed to hit it off pretty well. I remember hanging with him in one classroom listening to him telling me all about the story behind Pink Floyd recording "The Wall".
Suddenly, though, it seemed as if he had suddenly stopped liking me. It became impossible to engage him in conversation, when I would try to take his picture, as I had before, he would order me not to. He didn't even say "hi" to me in the halls anymore.
Well, I became angry. I never confronted him on why he changed, but I wrote an angry(and very poorly-written) song about him, I wished he'd have some accident and never be able to play music again, I openly bashed him in front of other kids(who all defended him, to my chagrin).
Junior year, we were both established musicians at school. This meant we wound up crossing paths again, having to play together(he was a guitarist, I'm a bassist). We never really interacted anymore, but we shared a mutual respect towards one another as musicians.
Years later, I see exactly why he "changed". I was following that guy around everywhere, trying to engage in conversation about the stupidest things, and with trying to take his picture after being so disgusted with me, I was completely hounding the poor guy! I was very presumptuous about the status of our "friendship". I never laid off the kid. And since NTs are so horribly uncomfortable telling us what we're doing wrong, I never knew until I looked back on it all.
And to think I'd directed all my rage toward him for "mistreating" me. He was trying to get a break from me!
This has got me thinking. From an NT perspective he wouldn't want to say to outright say to you 'please I need a bit of space, I don't want you around all the time' as that would come across as rude but also NT's instinctively know when too much of any social behaviour is too much, and so they expect others to be aware of that and therefore he would have felt you were overstepping a boundary that he would expect you to know about, therefore he thought of you as rude.
And he was giving you the disinterested treatment as a way of non-verbally telling you to back off.
I have had some friends that were rude all the time but not in a mean way, just in a tell it like they see it sort of way and I found that quite refreshing, I find all the non-spoken rules the way people expect behaviour to happen a bit stifling, but it's a lot easier once you learn them.
01 Apr 2010, 6:39 am
