Flavours of distress

I’ve just finished giving an interview for my friend Nick about my endometriosis, and I’m feeling rather upset.  He said it would be about it’s effect on my employment, and attitudes of family and employers to that.  That’s what I agreed to talk about.  He said he wouldn’t ask anything terribly personal. 

But when I got there he asked mostly about my experiences with Centrelink, how they treated me, and lots of questions about how things made me feel.  I was caught off guard, and I answered.  Perhaps I should have given more thought to all the possibilities of how this interview could turn out, and what I’d do.  I’m thinking now that if I’d known he would ask about difficult experiences with Centrelink, and about my emotions, I wouldn’t have gone ahead with his interview. 

I didn’t realise it at the time, but it really does bring up a lot of painful unresolved stuff when I go trying to remember every nasty thing that happened to me, and the particular flavour of distress that each produced.  Why does he need to know how I felt anyway?  I’ve always thought it’s just rude to ask people that.  Especially when the event they’ve described is obviously an upsetting one.  Voyeuristic. 

I’m also a little worried because he’s a friend.  This is not part of a research project, it’s only for a first-year assignment practising interviewing for qualitative research.  So surely he doesn’t need any personal information for that.  So perhaps it is just a voyeuristic personal interest of his. 

Perhaps the more important issue here is that it seems I have a lot of unresolved emotional pain around all these old experiences.  I guess I really don’t think about the past much, and I don’t think about how people’s assorted forms of unpleasantness leave me feeling.  I try to focus on the present, and on what I can do.  If I do find myself feeling upset over something, I think I focus on why I’m upset, and on resolving the issue internally or externally.  Not all this powerless stuff. 

Well, perhaps it deserves some looking at.  If it still upsets me, there’s still garbage there.