Recently I had a friend tell me that she had to participate in a group workshop at her work, and that for the workshop, she had to write an essay about herself beforehand so that she would have it to read out loud to her fellow workmates on the day of the workshop. I listened and wondered why she was sharing this with me, because I was feeling like there was a question in her telling me, as opposed to just her sharing.
Sure enough, after much hem and hawing, the question reared it’s ugly head and it was this. “Can you write the essay for me?” I was shocked at the question and didn’t know how to respond as many questions of my own started filling my head, and thus began my own hemming and hawing. During that moment of pause, my friend interrupted the silence and told me that the “reason” she was asking me to write the essay for her was because I am such a good writer, (flattery got her no where, :-)) and because I knew her so well.
My silence continued because I didn’t know what to say, or rather, I knew what I wanted to say “No,” but she’s such a dear friend and I love her dearly that I wanted to help her at the same time. On the one hand, I thought that the best way to help her was to tell her she had to do it, and not let her off the hook of delving inside and really looking at herself. On the other hand, since she never asks anyone for any kind of help at all, for her to be asking me for this must have meant she really thought it through.
And then this thought came to my mind. What if she was saying, “Filippo, help me see myself through your eyes.” And all of a sudden my own eyes started to fill up with tears. I realized that maybe, just maybe, my friend just couldn’t see herself in all her beauty and was asking me to help her see herself and to help her find her inner beauty.
After having that realization, I decided I was going to do this WITH her, and proceeded to ask her to send me an E-mail in which she listed ten things that made her happy, ten things that she liked to do, ten places she liked to go to and ten things she liked to eat. Those were the first things that came to mind.
Within minutes, she had sent me an E-mail with all the detail I had asked for and more. I was proud of my friend, this showed me that she definitely KNEW herself, only thing was, she didn’t SEE herself. What was on the paper were words. Though there were a lot of beautiful things written there, they had a thread that she couldn’t see. It was like a sheet of music paper with a bunch of musical chords written on them, but they were not in an order that could produce a beautiful melody.
I sat with the “notes,” for over a week, glancing at them everyday and a couple times a day to try and get them to speak to me, tell me what it was they wanted me to know about her and help her know about herself. Finally this morning after I glanced at them one more time, it came to me, and the melody started playing in my head, and I immediately sat down and started writing out the melody of HER. It was beautiful as it poured out of me and I was enjoying it as I typed away, from hearing it in my head to seeing it play out on the computer in front of me. It was a great exercise for me and was happy to be doing this.
In the end, when I had finished, for some reason I decided to first send the E-mail to my friends Mother, and ask her if she thought I had captured the spirit of her daughter and if this would please her daughter. My friends Mother replied to me saying that she cried when she saw that I could see her daughter as she had always seen her and few people ever had. I then immediately E-mailed it to my friend.
This blog is so fresh, my friend hasn’t even seen it yet and therefore I haven’t heard from her yet, but I couldn’t wait to put down in a blog what I had learned from this exercise. I learned that sometimes we don’t see our forest through our own trees, that sometimes we need a mirror to look at ourselves, that it’s nice to have friends who see us for who we are and are willing to tell us, even if it means complimenting over and over again. 🙂 And just now I had a friend interrupt my thought, and I lost the thread of where I was going with this. And maybe that is perfect too, because I think we get it.