Ugh, I fucked up this morning.
In the era of coronavirus, I'm fortunate to have been reconnecting with a bunch of old friends from various times in my life. I've had Zooms with people from college and grad school that I haven't spoken with in years. I've had folks turning up on social media to say hey, how have you been, and it's been awesome.
You probably can guess where this is headed.
This morning, I opened Facebook and saw I had a friend request. I clicked it, and it was someone I haven't spoken to in 20 years, but we used to be good friends. I thought "Oh, so-and-so, that's great!" and clicked Accept. And then my brain caught up with me.
This is a friend who knew OM quite well. The requester never contributed to or enabled the A in any way, so he's not someone I needed to cut out of my life for any offense of his own. However, there was a definite risk of OM being on this person's friend list, and of overlapping circles if I started reading and commenting on his posts. I simply could not believe I had even a few seconds of lag time in which this didn't occur to me.
So now I was going to have to unfriend this person and tell BH about the interaction. Of course, this had to happen on a day when I know that BH has a very busy and stressful workload that requires him to be completely focused. He was up late working last night and taking a brief recharging nap before his next meeting. I wondered if I should wake him up to disclose immediately. Then I thought, no, I should let him sleep, and maybe wait until after the meeting so he wouldn't get thrown off. Just that idea, the concept of hiding anything to "protect" BH even for a few hours, brought on a powerful, physical wave of nausea.
My old friend Denial came back to help me out. Maybe this friend was as out of touch with OM as he had been with me. It would calm me down considerably if OM wasn't on his friend list. Scroll through a thousand names, wincing every time I see someone we knew in common. Of course, there he is.
I click "Unfriend" and nope the hell out of there. I make a silent mental apology to the requester that it's not personal. I wonder if I should send an actual message to that effect, then tell myself to get over myself. He's gotten along fine for decades without talking to me; he's not going to sweat the snub, if he even notices it at all. This is just a distraction to avoid thinking about having to bring up the topic of OM with BH.
So now I'm feeling even sicker. I'm wondering if I compounded my error just by looking for OM's name. After all, I was going to have to unfriend this person on general principle whether OM was on the list or not. The requester is clearly out there reviving old connections, so even if OM wasn't on his list today, he could be there tomorrow. Searching for OM's name suddenly feels like I was caught stalking him. I'm not just nauseous at this point, I'm practically doubled over.
So I go upstairs and lie in bed next to BH and wait for him to wake up. As soon as he does, I unload the whole story in a single breath. BH is obviously not thrilled that the topic of OM is invading an already stressful day, but he is absolutely amazing in his response to me. He doesn't get angry that I clicked accept without thinking, he's glad I unfriended my way back out of the situation, he's really glad that the idea of hiding anything from him was unendurable. My blood pressure and heart rate start to normalize.
So now I'm relieved but also really surprised and angry at myself. I would have said that if anyone from that era of my life turned up, my first thought would be caution, to protect BH. I failed. If I hadn't accepted the friend request, I could have left it ignored until talking with BH about it tonight. Instead, I created a situation that had to be dealt with immediately and threw a real wrench in his day.
Ironically, the only thing I'm actually pleased about is my bout with nausea. It's good to know that my internal compass reacted violently to anything that felt like deception. If only my brain was as quick to react as my stomach.