Friendship

Do you have a friend who lets you be the craziest possible person you could be? I mean someone who lets you explore possible reactions to things that happen in your day, without being judgmental or saying, "no, your wedding day is not the time to call your ex-boyfriend?" You need one. I have one.

I think of this as a kind of therapy--one time, at a "leadership training," we did a peer-to-peer coaching exercise. Yes, we did. At one point, while my coachee was describing what seemed to be an insurmountable problem for someone in our position, I asked her, "what's the craziest thing you can think of to do?" And she described something that was both crazy and completely uncrazy. In the end, our conclusion was that she'd do something based on her crazy idea, but minus a smidgen of crazy. The exercise was strangely and unexpectedly productive.

There's value in this: allowing yourself to explore the crazy, and then scaling it back to where you get to go with your gut while not leaving your mind out of it entirely.

In the context I'm thinking of: I got the brush-off from a guy I wasn't entirely convinced I was interested in. And, I got it via text message. It was completely unexpected, especially considering the mild way in which I had shown interest. After I got the text, I spent 45 minutes with my friend thinking of completely unreasonable responses--wedding dress-clad workplace drop-by? property destruction? lawsuit? In the end, I decided to just let it go, but it was so much more enjoyable to explore the possibility of hopping on the crazy train carrying all my luggage, and heading down the track at full speed.

Which, I suppose, makes me a woman.