Being OK being misunderstood

Are you Nicole Kidman, but sad?

This is what I was asked this week by a rowdy phlebotomist before he rammed a needle in my vein. I wasn’t sad, so I got mad about being misunderstood. (Being misunderstood is the most painful pattern in my relational life, so I’m sensitive to it in every possible setting, even among well-meaning phlebotomists.) I made my fist even tighter than he commanded me to. But I was too tired to stay mad long.

“I’m not sad,” I said sadly.

My legs were sticking to the chair, and I was confused—”Are you Nicole Kidman, but sad?” — is that like a compliment that somersaults into a reprimand? Or does he just ask everyone this as an icebreaker? Sometimes you don’t want your ice broken. We were not understanding each other.

“What’s going on, what do you have to be sad about?” he asked, changing out a new empty vial. He seemed poised in his purple latex gloves to jujitsu me out of sad into happy with sayings found on Target pillows. I know I’m supposed to live, laugh and love, Sir.

“I’m just tired,” I said. And even if I was sad, sometimes you don’t want to talk to the phlebotomist about why. I didn’t even know him well enough to call him “my phlebotomist,” let alone “Larry” or whatever his name was that wasn’t posted on his paper jacket.

“Why are you tired?” he asked. It was good bedside manner, but I misinterpreted his curiosity as needling around in my personal affairs. God, Larry, do you also want to know my social security number? Normally I would match the other person’s energy and buck up, make some kind of joke that if I’m Nicole Kidman, this lab must be the Moulin Rouge because blood is red, get it—rouge, red, wow I’m funny. But not today, “Larry.” I just stared at the blue plastic basket of urine samples and blood vials on the counter, wondering why they didn’t even try to have two separate baskets for them.

I left with less blood and a cotton ball taped in my elbow hinge. I walked up over the hill past a bunch of rotting bungalows to my car. The sun was high but not hot, and the weed-whackers were buzzing. It was the first time I can remember being ok with a degree of mutual misunderstanding. Of letting a jumbled connection stay jumbled without fearing that it would rip the space-time continuum and leave me in a free-fall of loneliness. It was a a baby step, given that I had no actual relationship with the blood man and so no real relationship to lose. But it was still a step.

Over and over I’m learning that the relational universe is more friendly and forgiving than I’ve realized before. It is hardwired for ruptures and repairs, for long confusions and flashes of insight. It is able to hold all the things I currently understand, misunderstand, and partially understand; all the things I will never understand; and all the world’s willful or accidental ignorances and wisdoms. And where relationships have shown the opposite in my life, where misunderstanding has led to pain and chaos—even those things, on the long view, are worked together to root me into a sense of worth and security that’s independent from needing to be understood.

I climbed in my Subaru and sat there before turning the key. Did he ask me if I was Nicole Kidman, but sad? I smiled, and that ripped the space-time continuum for sure— into a smile and laugh, into an expanded, gentler version of things.

Sending an extra blue basket from the belonging frontier,

Cat