Pushing and Shifting

How is it that certain people really know how to push your buttons?  OMG, it’s like they just know the right thing to say and how to say it, and you just want to fly off the handle…until you realize that you’re being played.

This button pushing is more obvious with men than with women.  Men seem to delight in the whole pushing effort.  They plan, they deliver the play and they sit back and wait for the reaction, and usually, we (women) do not disappoint them. We get all huffy, we start spouting off at the mouth, and we search for an equally pithy comeback so we don’t look like we’ve been totally suckered into the whole thing.

Women tend to be a bit shifty and underhanded when it comes to button pushing. We play the whole scenario out in our minds…If I do this, he’ll do this, that or that.  And if he does those, this is how I’ll respond to each of those reactions…  We usually push buttons if we want a certain thing to go our way, or they’ve pissed us off so badly, we want revenge.  Usually, our sneaky play-by-play works. Every once in a while, we get caught in the act.

I usually refrain from button pushing because I’d much rather be an open book.  This coming from a woman that’s managed to keep most of her business “close to the vest” for most of her life.  But I’d say over the past 10 years, I’ve been really good at communicating and getting most of my secrets out in the open so they don’t come back to haunt me.  To my knowledge, I think I only have one secret left.  Unfortunately, I’m beginning to realize that I need to filter things to certain people.  This bugs the crap out of me, but I won’t have a moment’s peace if I don’t.

I didn’t do this filtering, and thus….someone decided to push my button over the incident.  When I got the button push, I could feel my blood boiling and was ready to fire off some really choice words. Why can’t they just let this go? Why do they have to make me suffer over the whole sorted crap? I realize that the incident really hurt them, much more than I could’ve imagined, so I should not have said anything.  Their button pushing was a way for them to let out some of this angst on the person that delivered the salvo. So instead of falling for the button pushing, I walked away for a few hours to let it dissolve a bit (this is big for a person like me, thanks to the great advice from a certain Guru).

I tell you Peeps…I really feel like I’m tiptoeing through a minefield. This life that I now have is changing me and I think some people are having problems keeping up with the changes.  Hell, I’m having problems making the changes. When you figure out that you’re about to cause a paradigm shift to your entire life, you have no idea what that entails and what the fallout is going to be. You really pray that all of your friends will still be around during and long after the shift, but there are no guarantees.  After all, you’ve basically forced the shift on them as well. They are used to you being a certain way, with a certain person, living a specific kind of life. They didn’t necessarily sign on for the changes you’re making.  

It comes as a shock to you when you realize…”Hey, I can’t say this or share this anymore”.  Or “I can’t be as blunt and forthcoming as I’d like”.  I wouldn’t be in this position if I had kept everything status quo, if I’d stayed married. It just seems like lately, I’m either disappointing people or they’re disappointing me. I’m either misunderstanding people, or they’re misunderstanding me. I can’t wait for this awkward stage to be over.  I am afraid of the fallout though.

Oh well…nothing a shot of Fireball and a straight razor won’t handle.

On a side note:  I just managed to piss off my co-worker who sits next to me.  He thinks Hillary Clinton would make a better President than Sarah Palin.  I told him that while Sarah isn’t my candidate of choice, I’d choose her over Hillary because I’d rather have a brainless beauty queen then a lying, scheming, thief like Hillary.  I told him to remember Benghazi and White Water, but he never uses facts, he just argues on popular opinion.   He walked off in a huff cuz he was totally unnerved.  When he came back, he apologized and said that he made it personal and that even though I’m wrong, he shouldn’t have gotten mad. I said that it wasn’t personal, we’re just having a discussion.  This isn’t the first time this has happened…should’ve heard our discussion on gun control.  My argument was based on statistics, his on the fact that I shouldn’t own a machine gun.  Hmmmmm.