I was recently attending an industry conference and was talking to a friend. Not someone I know really well, but someone that I see a few times every year. As we were talking, we realized how much we not only had in common but how some of our thoughts about things were the same.
During one of our conversations, she was telling me how she travels a lot for work and how when she gets home from trips, that she recently has no desire to do anything!! She was clearly questioning why she feels this way. As we continued the conversation I asked about her group of “local” girlfriends, and she said she had a group but didn’t seem excited about them.
As we continued talking, it came out that she often felt left out of that group. When she found out they did things without her, their response was we thought you might be too busy or out of town. The other piece of this is that if she did want to get together with them, she always had to plan the outing.
I confessed that it was in a lot of ways the same with my girlfriends, they don’t want to “bother me” by texting me about things and I always must be the planner of outings. So, my first random thought is to those girlfriends, always invite us when you are doing something and we will let you know if we are out of town because you don’t know until you ask (and I clearly don’t expect you to try to keep up with my schedule)!
I think my message here has more to do with the conversation that we had. When we talked a little further that same night, she told me that just talking to me about it made her feel better. Did I do anything to really help her? OR did I just give a listen to what she was saying and let her talk and let her have her emotion over it and confess that at times I felt the same? It is definitely the latter and the lesson is that sometimes we just need someone to listen, someone to share with and someone to not judge us but to support us and what we need at that moment!
