I wrote a small intro to my new project and being happy and proud about my "work of heart" as I called it, I got my friend to have a look at it straight away... And then it all ended in tears...
That little intro was a "baby" of several days of intense mental labour pains. When it was finally born I thought it was beautiful. My expectation was to "wow" my friend. I hoped my friend would be able to see through the little details here and there which I will work on later anyway to the true depth of what's in front of him. Well, where there is an expectation - there is a disappointment.
Turned out the way he appreciates work is to first "quickly" - or what seems like forever on the receiving end - go through all the flaws. Once it's out of the way he can spend some time enjoying all the great parts and praise them thoroughly. As you can imagine, we never got to the latter.
Without knowing, he stepped into a deep legacy issue. My mum, always driven by the desire to improve me, never praised my "works of heart" be it an article, a song or a meal. To motivate me to be better she would list all the flaws of my creation and talk about them in depth. In the end, if I was lucky, there would be something like "but overall it is quite good" said.
Of course, "always" and "never" are emotionally coloured words which reflect my perception but in reality that was 9 out of 10 times situation. So today when my friend instead of tearing up with a beauty of what he was reading (I admit that was quite unrealistic to expect) started telling me what needed to be improved or as he put it "reflecting on what I wrote together" - I drew the only conclusion possible based on my life experience, that my work was no good. And considering it just came out of my heart, I fell in tears way before my friend could get to the praising part.
It was not so much the need for praise I was looking for - inside I was entirely happy with my work (for that moment in time). I just wanted to share how moved I was by it and that it was a big team achievement to have something like this in writing for the benefit of our joint project.
Anyway, when he actually got a chance to say how good he thought it was, all I could hear was "I'm saying something nice about it, so you don't cry anymore little girl".
Looking back at the big drama of this morning, I just think it was a bit unfortunate for my friend. What it showed me is that I still need to learn to leave my tyrants in the past and to let go of any expectations towards others.
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