Listening - is it my greatest weakness, or my greatest strength? Do I prefer friends who are great listeners, and let me be the selfish one, or is it better to have friends who like to talk, letting me be the listener, the needed one, the support? Obviously it is good to have all of the above situations! However the thing with listening is that it's always changing, shifting, but always feeling great. There's nothing I love more than getting a note from a friend thanking me for listening to them. On the other side, I can't thank my friends enough for listening to me babble about whatever the heck I feel like, and let me tell you, it's not always important!

I recognize that the things I just wrote aren't exactly a new revelation, so let's cut to the chase. I read recently in a psychology paper from here or there, you find a lot of new things on the internet when you don't have a lot to do at work, that said that in a conversation, the listener is actually the one in control, and the speaker is developing emotional dependency on the listener. The other piece of my revelation is that while going through some stressors recently, I found that two of my best listeners were people who really shouldn't have taken that role. I would prefer not to point them out, since all of my friends are created equal (wink), but I'm going to, just to demonstrate the unexpectedness of this. The first is my boss. She's not that much older than me, so a friendship isn't that unlikely, but the fact that we managed to cross some boundaries and still maintain a healthy working relationship was really amazing. The second was my ex-boyfriend's sister. I was literally putting her between a rock and a hard place. She held up like a champ (obviously plays by rule #76). Now that I'm feeling better and don't need to tearfully ramble at painful lengths of time, I look back at them with so much appreciation and respect. Maybe no one knew exactly what was going on, but just by letting me talk, we developed friendships that are invaluable to me, and in semi-inappropriate places! I also appreciate that none of us needed to live our lives in black and white, we were open to see how things would unfold for us.