I was doing my usual dry delivery of a quirky silly train of thought yesterday when someone in my trusted circle made a sarcastic remark to the effect that it was a good thing I don’t find myself in that situation a lot. Okay, that made no sense unless I actually explain that I was talking about a paternity case we handled in the family law court I was put into yesterday. The case where the court established that a divorcing woman’s child is the offspring of the guy she was having the affair with, and not the husband, which was proven up with a DNA test. I said about that, “Why do people want to make their lives so complicated, so that I have to go through all this strange stupid paperwork because of them?” She chuckled. It was my first paternity case, and I had struggled through all the unfamiliar paperwork and computer entries involved. I continued, “And these people always make us do their work for free cuz they get fee waivers [claiming they’re indigent and can’t pay for legal proceedings]. I pay my taxes, and I don’t use any government services for free cuz I don’t qualify for them. These people don’t even pay taxes and get all this free stuff. I should go and do something stupid with my life so that I can take advantage of welfare-type services, like have a kid out of wedlock. But no, I wouldn’t get welfare cuz I’d be employed. So maybe I should commit a CRIME, get into the criminal law system, cuz everything THERE’s provided for free and then I could really make my taxes benefit myself. But then with my income, I’d probably be required to pay back the services of the public defender, so that wouldn’t work, either.” I mean, it was a non-serious, goofy stream-of-consciousness I was saying aloud because I recognize the ridiculousless of the nature of the thoughts and therefore shared them for the possible entertainment value. It was a joke. I wasn’t really upset about not having and wanting indigency services. She said sarcastically, “It’s a good thing you aren’t in family law much.”

It’s not that she made a comment, it’s that it’s the third or fourth such comment she’d made fairly recently that implied I thought and/or talked too much about nothing. And it’s not that I DON’T overthink things, cuz apparently I do, as this post itself proves. It’s just that I feel she misunderstood me and the point of my words when she made that comment, and for some reason that’s still bothering me. It’s either because I think so highly of her that I don’t want her thinking badly of me, so that right now I feel like I exposed myself trustingly and got made fun of to my surprise in return; or maybe it’s because since early childhood, I’ve had a sensitivity to being misinterpreted, misunderstood, wronged in a sense. When someone I don’t care about doesn’t “get” me and misunderstands something, I just roll my eyes irritably and move on. But in someone I do care about, it just really bothers me when someone’s got a wrong impression of me or something I said.

I said to Mr. W after the trusted person had left, that I need to remember to stop thinking out loud around her because I don’t think she gets me so she thinks I’m being overdramatic over nothing. He laughed and said that he got me, and that he did think the absurdity of what I was saying was amusing. It reminds me of his proposal, how he said most people don’t get me but that he’s one of the lucky ones who do and he gets to laugh. I guess that’s what’s really important, anyway. I just wish I didn’t have to watch my step so carefully around someone I want to comfortably be my off-colored self around.