The second Letter

I replied in haste on Friday, and apart from telling you there will be no malign behaviour from me to you in public, I omitted to say something important. Your email was a shock to me. You genuinely seem hurt. And I don't understand why, but it seems you only really have been straight with me when I have gotten really angry.


For my part, I thought maybe the most useful thing I can do is tell you why I have been angry (ie how I have perceived things from the beginning) rather than why you may think I have been angry. That may help something like this never happening again for you. Hence this email.

Whether or not you read it is up to you. If you think I have misunderstood you or gotten things wrong and you think I could learn something from your point of view, then you can reply. I leave it entirely up to you.

This whole last year has made me doubt my sanity and at times my ability to get up and face another day. It is hard to think of a worse outcome to this = It is the one I dreaded and desperately wanted to avoid. And the only thing that I can think of that would be positive is that we both learn something. In terms of personal and professional ramifications, I have already said how I will behave and leave the rest to you.

From my point of view then, this rather soap=opera like saga goes like this:

First we were friends. I liked you as friend, and the more I got to know the more I liked. That was not romantic. I wear my heart on my sleeve and I genuinely enjoyed your company, and wanted to know you better. I thought that part at least was mutual. I got to know you reasonably well, or so I thought - at least well enough to trust you with all sides of me and not present a veneered version. I thought that was mutual too. At first everything that I did was in friendly affection, presents, overblown gestures and all. I genuinely liked you. And that is how I show it, especially to people who are difficult to read and not always overt or clear with their feelings.

You never led me on in a romantic sense. But you did lead me on in a friendship. And you enjoyed my attention, so it seemed. I never felt that anything I had done up until telling you how I felt in december had made you uncomfortable or uneasy, or that you would rather I hadn't done them. If you were giving me hints, I'm afraid I was missing them.

Unfortunately this all happened on a (long term) background of things going on for me in my marriage. So unwillingly, and unwittingly, yes I fell for you, and I realised this a while before I told you - probably fully about 7 months before, just before we started at ESH. No I did not think you felt the same way. I really hoped you might, as I explained. But that was not why I told you.

As far as telling you goes I was in a massive dilemma. I knew if I told you it would risk a friendship. But equally, I was trying to work through my marriage problems and it was a huge distraction to that; also, if I didn't tell you, I couldn't call it a friendship if I was lying to you. I am useless at pretending and hiding things. I thought after everything we had been through the previous year that you would be wise enough and strong enough to understand and to help me get past it, and that our friendship, although initially changed, would survive.

So I put everything on the line and told you. And you seemed to take it really well and be really supportive. You even asked if I had someone to talk to , and seemed very sympathetic and understanding. That filled me with hope. I know I promised not to communicate for a while - I had never intended it to be forever, but thought I would need some months to just clear my head and deal with what was going on at home. But you were one of the few friends I had that was not tied up in a whole past of a lifetime with Jess, and in the darkest moments of the following months I crumbled. I missed our friendship a lot. My best friend buggered off across the atlantic, and the only other friend I could talk to about it was going through a divorce.

Then we met for the first time in a while in London for the houseofficers reunion. Things had been a little awkward before then, but not too bad. And I was really heartened at how warm you seemed to be initially. Although there were one or two moments when I realised you still felt you had to draw a line between us and I understood that although it was painful.

I wanted to meet you after that. Why? Not because I was mooning after you Nic but because I wanted to talk, to talk about how we could move forward, to discuss stuff like what made you feel awkward so I could avoid doing that and to work out how we could be friends again. To talk through and figure out in time and gentleness the stuff that has been thrashed out in rage in the last 2 months. Instead I got completely blanked and avoided. Lied to most obviously to avoid me, and ignored. Cut dead. I have to say that sort of response always has, and did, rile me.

I couldn't understand why you would do that - I didn't think I had misread that you cared about me as a friend. I got more and more frustrated and bewildered trying to figure out why you had and were just ignoring me. Finally I got a whole reluctant minute of your time and you said we couldn't be friends any more because of what other might say or think. I heard that and was gutted but hoped maybe with time things might be better.

Now, a very long time into this Saga, I understand you were thinking of what had happened with this chap before and were panicked that the same thing would happen again. If I had known and you had talked to me things might have been different - I might have understood the silences better, and would have sent less communications as I wouldn't have been trying to provoke a response. Similarly you have only just told me the other day that ignoring me is your way of avoiding dealing with something painful - I couldn't understand how you could be so cold and feel nothing for our friendship and show no remorse at how things were. It seemed cruel and callous to me and hurtful - but you are telling me that actually they were the very signs of hurt I was trying to find.

All I needed to hear was then would have been what you wrote in the first part of your reply to your letter. Thanks, I'm flattered but I don't feel the same and never will. Then it would have been my problem to deal with. And I would have. I am not saying I would not have been hurt, but I think I could have taken some time to deal with that, and the friendship might have survived, even if we had to set a clear change of rules. We both would have known the other was hurting, I would have understaod what was going on for you and behaved more helpfully and maybe we would have got past it.

If we had got that far, maybe things might have gone a little differently.

Instead, I got less and less communication, more and more blanking, and the only real feed back I got from you at all was when I got angry at being ignored and said so. All the time I was looking for a sign that you cared enough to want to try and preserve what could be preserved.

BUT the thing, THE THING that has hurt me and made me furiously, spitefully, blood-boilingly angry though was NOT that you didn't fancy me back. That hurt, of course, but NOTHING compared to feeling that you didn't seem in the slightest bothered or upset about throwing our friendship back in my face. All that silence and ignoring and blanking: THAT is the message it conveyed to me, whether that was the intention or not. At no point did you seem hurt, so if it is meant to disguise that, it does, very well.

I desperately didn't want to believe that cruelty was the intention. So much so, that I wildly over compensated. In that horrible period of interview pressure, of the blackest most awful and loneliest christmas of my life, and of the sleep deprivation and emotional stress of A&E, the slightest glimmer of friendliness on your behalf made me disproportionately happy and the coldness disproportionately sad. I have told you that before. And in all of that, I didn't know about your panicked dilemma based on your past with that bloke. So all I needed was a friend, I needed my friend Nic back, the one who made me carrot cakes after a really shit week, or invited me over to new years when I was on my own, or laughed and told me something silly she had done to cheer me up. That sort of thing. Someone to say it would all be OK, and that even though I'd fucked up she'd stick around and help me reassemble the pieces, because I was worth that much to her at least to her. Of course, unknown to me, you took all the texts and communications an entirely different way. I guess you were worrying about what everyone else would think of you, and less about what I might be thinking?

And part of that disproportionate foolishness on my part was to give you that present at the start of A&E. That really was supposed friendly , i wanted things to be OK between us. Actually it was a collection of things some of which I had thought about the previous year, way before things got out of hand, and was genuinely intended as a peace offering and a friendly gesture. In a way, it was a gesture I hoped you could return; carrot cake style. Since you wouldn't talk to me, threw it back in my face which REALLY hurt, and kept behaving in a blank way or awkward way when I was around, I just wanted to make things right even more.

At this point with continued blanking, I started to suspect that my friendship had been a one way thing. I suspected that you felt nothing like sincere or deep friendship towards me, but that I'd outlived my usefulness and really you just wanted me to fuck off and leave you alone but didn't have the courage to say so directly. Again, I couldn't believe I had been so wrong about our initial friendship and mutual affection as friends - I have never been misplaced before this about friendships, and although I am transparent, I don't just give myself away. I have said this before too.

Eventually, I made a serious error of judgment in that I thought maybe you had felt something in romantic in return after all, and just were too afraid of the consequences to be honest, hence all the awkwardness. So I wrote you a letter. I was honest about what I felt - I DO/DID feel personal affection towards you but that is NOT just a physical attraction _ I liked you as a person, and THAT is what was worth saving; I thought that friendship, that fondness for each other as people was mutual.

Again, all you need have said at that point was that you only saw me as a friend and never would see me as anything else. That some affectionate gestures like presents made you feel awkward because of your past, that you had a past where you felt you might have lead someone one unknowingly, and didn;t want to do the same or be seen as doing that. If you had said just that, and that you would not be prepared to be alone with me for that reason, but that the friendship meant something and you were prepared to try and preserve it as long as I understood where you were coming from - well then things could have been very different.

I NEVER wanted you to feel awkward and was mortified that I had suffocated you. But you didn't tell me WHY you felt that way initially - just that you did. I was very upset that you just rejected my gestures without talking to me, and blanked me, ignored me avoided me looked at me like you had just trodden in shit. That was how it felt.

BUT importantly, for whatever reason, and I still don't really understand why, you went a step further than that. You said THE most wounding thing a so called friend has ever said to me. "I don't have the same fondness for things about you that you have for everything about me. The friendship means to you more than it does to me...But I am sad to lose the social support we had going."

Nic my friends are a lot more to me than the odd bit of social support. For me a friend is more than a colleague or an acquaintance. It is someone I would lay my life on the line for, who I am loyal to, and would move heaven and earth to defend, protect and support if they asked me to or needed it. Ask any one of my friends at my 30th. They would all say that about me. And I have found that for me that has been the most rewarding part of my life - I have many deep friendships which have come about by making myself vulnerable enough to trust someone like that. I trusted you like that, and was very vulnerable to you. So try and understand, if this is my take on the definition of friendship, what your words meant to me.

Maybe that is not what friendship means to you. I can't speak for you. But I am someone who when I feel something, I feel it deeply. I have strong and deep emotions. That is who I am - I think most people who have known me for longer than 5 minutes would say that. And everyone who has been my friend has been in for a penny, in for a pound. Or they haven't been my friend in the first place.

So I can honestly say to you I can't remember anyone who has hurt me as much - hence my absolute fury and distress and lashing out. NOT because of the rejection of my romantic interest - oddly enough, although I was sad about that, it did not hurt nearly as much as you seeming to throw away what to me was a precious friendship with what seemed effortless ease. I felt betrayed, used, dirty. All along I thought you had valued the friendship equally; that the closeness from our house jobs and from talking over and experiencing everything we did together meant something important to you too. When we had our PRH House Officer's meal out at the Bull and I said I felt closer to some people in that room than people I have known my whole life, you were one of those. And I remember you saying to me that evening that it was an important night for you too, that you felt the same. At least that is what I understood from you. So what you said in reply to my letter, it was like someone had just invalidated all that in one fell swoop. And like I said, that for me was a whole new world of pain.

Try and think of a friend you DO care about, someone you HAVE found something to be fond of about them. And try and imagine how you would feel if, right after you had told them that, they said they couldn't find anything about you to feel fond of, not one single thing.

Well, you know the rest.

I lost it and lost it big time. I felt used. I questioned everything, every friendship I have, every relationship, the whole schabang. I couldn't believe I had been so mistaken in you, I didn't want to believe I had been. In fact, I still deep down don't want to believe it.

NOT because I felt a deep romantic attachment but because I DID/DO feel a deep attachment of friendship (for me the former can't come without the latter, but the latter can certainly be had without the former).

I really thought we might have gotten back at least to a civilised point at our last exchange. I thought we were having nothing to do with each other outside of work, but that we were being civil (I hold you no grudge and will not be unkind etc etc) and for me that means not treating each other differently from other colleagues - with the obvious exception of socialising together going for coffee etc. And yet times I saw you in the recent past you ignored me completely, until I was stood opposite you in the PGMC!! I'm afraid by then I was really hurting - I was just getting over the shock of your response to my letter, and more being blanked - this felt like deliberate cruelty and salt rubbing in the wound. And I just concluded that you were being spiteful. That all along, you just wanted to say whatever you needed to to get rid of me. So I thought since nothing seems to have hurt you, affected you, registered with you, what thing can I do or say that might get through might register the extent of the hurt I feel when you blank me like that. Because I felt since I had risked and lost everything and done all the fighting for a friendship it transpired you hadn't seemd to reciprocate, this hadn't cost you anything at all, and you deserved to know something of the pain your silence and aloofness caused me. So I asked for my presents back - the most shock-tactic thing I could think of doing - with the thought that it would get you to you register the degree of distress your aloofness was causing me. Actually I mentioned the edible ones sarcastically, thinking you would have eaten them anyway! - thinking you might get that it was a shock tactic. But instead you returned them. You actually did that. And you told me that you had binned what you could not return. It seems we got in a muddle about that one too, because I understood your text in reply to be mocking me, not trying to assuage further angry demands. I thought you were saying "well it was all trivia and binable to you anyway" - which made me even madder, because it just seemed to fly in the face of all your reassurances that you had been hurt too, that the friendship meant something to you too.

I know I succumbed to pettiness in asking for that stuff back. I don't like that in myself and I apologise for that. I know I said I was trying to be helpful on Friday - I lied, I'm sorry. I was embarrrassed that I had actually gotten that far. But I guess you are right when you say it reflects the depth of my feelings but you are mistaken if you think it reflects romantic feelings. I take friendship VERY seriously and that is reflected in how many friends I have kept, and the depth of friendship I have with them, and in how angry and hurt I am when I feel my friendship is taken for granted or abused.

Most of the last 2 years You seemed to behave like most people I have been close friends with and reciprocated. You appeared to welcomed my attentions as a friend, and gave me your friendship in return as far as I could interpret.

I see that as a totally separate issue to falling for you, and valued it separately.

To be honest I still don't and am not sure I will ever really understand why you said the friendship mattered to you. On the one hand say something like that, and then you ask me to accept that you have been hurt by what I think/thought of your behaviour = that you even care what I think or feel. It is all a bit confusing. But overall, the impression you left me with in all of this was never once that you think our friendship was worth preserving. You just seemed to want to be as far away from me as possible - to me off into outer space as far as you were concerned. And that didn't seem fair. It appears to me to have been a virtually entirely one way thing, at least in the terms I define friendship in above; you seemed as though you couldn't bring yourself to trust enough friendship was there to talk straight to me, for whatever reasons past or present.

The only evidence I have of genuine friendship and hurt came in the last 2 confrontations. You hid everything else, and the consequence of that was to make me a clear impression you didn't give a damn for our friendship.

You know, we could have talked about this in a very public and non-threatening place, we could have avoided any confrontation at all, and avoided all of this hurt. If we had been open and honest from the beginning back in January. It would have had less personal and professional consequences for us both. I would have, and did trust you when I made myself vulnerable to you Nic. I would have thought that would be enough for you to see that I intended no harm, and to trust me in return. For whatever reasons, it didn't seem that you could do that, and worse, the aloofness made it seem you were just riding roughshod over me. And I in return lashed out in pain.

And the result of everything is a bloody, painful mess. Can it heal?
Well, that depends. I will say for my part, that if you told me outright, unambiguously that the friendship was reciprocated, then I would unconditionally forgive you. I hope you could do the same. And though things will never be the same as they once were, the atmosphere might be better. A lot of time and space over the summer may give enough healing for it to work. Like you said. I've been hurt before too, and what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

So there you go. My take on everything. I am willing to be corrected if I have erred. Nic you said in your mail, you were/are unable to continue it with me on any level. I leave that up to you. You have heard the last from me unless you choose different.

But either way, I desperately want to learn from this, want it not to happen again, want there to have been some point to it all beyond a miserable year. And with this email, I will trust you with my friendship one last time.