The Subtle Saga of Susan - 2

Pain.  What kinds of things caused Susan pain?

The onset of another's socially tailored "approach" to herself, for example, caused Susan the pain of silent outrage.  The "tailored approach" was a person's contrived "gearing up" of face and voice to pose a "sensitive" question ("sensitive," most likely, to the other person) to Susan about herself as though she were an alien creature.  This was always the "Here comes the face" moment, when the other's face would lean in toward Susan with exaggerated intent . . . betraying the poorest acting abilities imaginable, along with rattled nerves.

Susan thought of this as the "kid gloves" approach, the utterly transparent social method of "handling" a presumably "fragile" person.  More often than not, such an approach was actually "the velvet glove that hides the fist," and the "kid gloves" would have been better applied to the emotionally unstable questioner.  Such questioners usually believed they were successfully masking some degree of their own unvented spleen, personal axes to grind lurking beneath the surface.

Picture, for a moment, the camera honing in on an aging female psychotherapist with numerous small facial tics and twitches due to unacknowledged, unmitigated resentment.  Imagine the camera moving closer and closer as the therapist's face grows larger and larger, the lens exposing each twitch of the ever-tightening lips which, themselves, compress the existence of sheer rage, lips which open only against the most extreme inner tension to form the words, "Tell me, dear, why duplicitous people upset you."

This is how the approach of "handling people" appeared to Susan.

Invariably, in such cases, the "ax" floating beneath the surface was not Susan's "ax," but rather the dissatisfaction and bitterness of another who would have done better to mind his own business with discretion and dignity.

(To be continued . . . . . )