I needed to talk to my professor about some papers–but I knew I couldn’t do it while other students were in the room. So I waited patiently until the last student left.<\/p>\n
And then came the moment I’d been afraid of.<\/p>\n
“Rebekah, how are you?” he said in that tone that says he actually cares, that he’d be willing to hear the whole story if I wanted to share it.<\/p>\n
Just as I suspected, my eyes filled with tears and I could only take a deep breath and shrug, silently cursing myself for letting him see my weakness.<\/p>\n
It’s been a hard semester. Probably the hardest of my life. <\/p>\n
I’ve worked hard to not let it show–to not let my personal life infringe on my work and school life. If that meant spending long hours at home working on something that previously took me minutes, that’s what I’d do. If it meant crying out all of my tears in the evening so none could be left for work hours, that’s what I did. If it meant avoiding people in “normal life” so that I could be “on” for the hours that I had to be teaching or in meetings, so be it.<\/p>\n
I think I was pretty successful. If any of my classmates (except Chante, the classmate who’s also a friend) or my supervisors or my teachers noticed, they didn’t let on. Except for Dr. Newman.<\/p>\n
Dr. Newman saw through my disguise and had compassion.<\/p>\n
And I hate it. I hate it that he has compassion on the weakness I cannot have compassion on.<\/p>\n
“Don’t be nice to me!” I want to shout. “Don’t allow me this weakness! I shouldn’t be weak. I can’t be weak. Despise me, hate me, be harsh with me–anything but kindness is welcome.”<\/p>\n
I don’t want to accept my weakness–and it galls me that he accepts it when I will not. <\/p>\n
Why is being shown compassion so painful?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I needed to talk to my professor about some papers–but I knew I couldn’t do it while other students were in the room. So I waited patiently until the last student left. And then came the moment I’d been afraid of. “Rebekah, how are you?” he said in that tone that says he actually cares, … Read more Painful Pity<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2543"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}