Someone watched me “work” a social situation yesterday, smoothing out ruffled feelings and making sure everyone got back on the same page. Apparently it was a masterful, and somewhat scary, thing to watch. I don’t really know how I feel about that.
On the one hand, yes. I did manipulate the situation. I did lead one person to a conclusion I thought needed to be reached, but I let said person reach it on their own. I just…helped. Steered the conversation, if you will. I suppose if you wanted to form it in cliche terms, I led the horse to the water, and the horse opted to drink.
On the other hand, I feel weird that someone watched me do that, and might have a much different impression of who I am – that I’m some weird manipulator or puppetmaster working things behind the scene to my own advantage (although, to clarify, nothing I did was for my own advantage, other than make sure two friends stayed friendly). I was assured that it wasn’t an issue, and that it was an awesome thing to watch me shift roles so fluidly and just handle the situation, and that, combined with my ability to get just about anyone to talk to me, simply left the witness wondering why I wasn’t working for the government in some information gathering service.
This apparently left a deep impression on my subconscious mind, because when I woke up this morning, I was having thoughts about being empiress of the world.
In other news, I have changed the RSS feed for this journal, so that it syndicates the entire post, not just a summary. I hope that makes reading more convenient for y’all.
People don’t like to admit that we all manipulate. And we do it often. But it’s not by definition a bad thing. We all coddle, mollify, flirt, cajole, beg, explain, hypothesize, demonstrate, challenge – all to mold particular outcomes out of various interactions, yes?
Sure…but then the question becomes one of whether or not there are lines to cross, and what those lines are.
At times, I do feel very puppetmaster-y, and I suspect that those are the times that, even though I might be “doing good”, I’m probably crossing some line or other of appropriateness.
What I need to do is just sit down with the person who watched said manipulation and say “uhm, please tell me you don’t think any less of me for that..” ๐