Optical Allusionist

So, you want to know about Devin? He and I were friends for a few weeks. We went on a couple dates, but he made it clear that he didn't want a relationship, so I backed off, and we were simply friends. I was nice to him, as he was new in the ward and needed a friend, but I suddenly got this letter.

Dear Shelly,

I want to write you so that I can hopefully make life easier for me. I percieve many things and I want to be able to clear things up at least in my mind and make things known before its too late.

I percieved from the first day that I met you that you were most likely attracted to me and since then this has developed into you wanting a relationship with me that involves dating.

I do not see you in any romantic sense. I am not physically attracted to you nor does your personallity attract my romantic emotions. You are a person who I instantly found was a strong personality, who appeared different from the "norm" although I could not know for sure what the "norm" in Utah is and I very much enjoy our conversations especially written ones. You have been a good friend to me and have been very supportive.

However your attraction to me is making me rather uncomfortable as I feel like I am waiting to turn you down just as soon as you muster enough courage to ask me out or suggest any kind of romantic situation between us. It is better far that I sqaush what desire you have to approach me as such now than wait till you've built yourself up for it. Logically this is true.

I do find myself more physically and mentally attracted to other individuals in our ward and in other wards I have met, but believe me that I am kind of picky when it comes to who I date as a girlfriend. I have a long list of criteria, I know EXACTLY what I want in a relationship and so because you did not fit that criteria the thought of you as my girlfriend never even crossed my mind until it became apparent that I was incited emotion inside of you.

I can deduce that you have probably not had many male friends who you were able to associate with on a regular basis. I am sorry if that was the case but I suggest that you practice with me because your friendship is all I expect out of you. I do not wish to state the things about you that make you not my criteria nor do I wish to state what is my criteria for the women I select but if it would make you feel better than I would be willing to share that with you provided that you did not disclose my response to anyone.

Now, I have personally known that someone was unavailable to me EVER and still was their friend for a long time and kept my crush. I have no problem with you feeling however you want to feel about me the only problem happens when the other girls around me start thinking that they can't touch me because you have some kind of claim on me. Now I also know that if I were to have a close friend who wanted a particular person I would choose to avoid liking that person in order to benefit my friend.

Besides any questions and or concerns you may have, please also give me a list of people you would prefer that I not try to date and I will give you my word to NEVER date them or take them on a date. I respect our friendship and would willing provide you this service.

sincerely,
devin



I sent him back a kind letter-- too kind almost-- and let it go, but I became sad, and eventually mad. With Caitlin and Lyndsi's encouragement, I burnt the letter, and delivered the ashes to his doorstep along with a curt message and a book he'd lent me.

This was his dastardly reply:

Dear Shelly,

I can feel so many emotions coming from you right now and last night I felt especially negative and did not know why. I realize now that you have been thinking highly negative thoughts about me and I want to tell you that they have reached me. My normal state of peace was so disturbed last night that I had to try and figure out a way to get rid of the negativity. It took me a little while. I now also am feeling quite negative but I also have other things which have managed to trouble me.

You do not understand what this means to me, you have willingly and knowingly wished to HARM me. I knowingly harmed you as well and probably more deeply however my intent was good. Your response showed the self strength and maturity I had hoped for and now this. Your intent is not good and not only that it is a change from what you previously stated. If you had replied to my letter honestly you would have told me of your pain and I would have gladly fulfilled my responsibility to ease the suffering I had created. You appeared let down rather than devestated and that is what I hoped to do by talking to you early and maturely. In the logic of the situation you have let me devestate your feelings, if I were to take your reaction as the way things work than I would refuse all friendship to females for the fear that they in turn would be attracted and then devestated if I told them what I told you. I will not do that however.

You will never have a friend quite like me again, are you sure you want to give that up? You may think me prideful but I want you to realisticly contemplate the situation. Have you EVER met anyone REMOTELY like me?

Regardless of whether or not you wish to be my friend I want to give you some advice, do not provoke me please. I am understanding but not all forgiving and I take the intention of a person's actions to mean a great deal.

These are the ways you can best provoke me

1 spreading negative rumors about me
2 advising people not to associate with me
3 advising people not to attend functions I will start
4 making a public show of how much you "hate" me

You mentioned that I could date lyndsi if I so wished. with new eyes I see that you are most jealous of her beauty as far as your friend circle is concerned. So her I will especially avoid and you can tell her that and share any information I have written you to anyone, that absolutely does not bother me.

But if you succeed to make an enemy out of me than my anger will be justified, you have deffinitely put me into a negative mood because I am already thinking about things I could do. I do not like such trains of thought and I sincerely do not wish to any longer.

You have been a great friend to me. Noone else took the initiative to speak one on one for a while with me other than you. You have given me rides and introduced me to your mother who is a very sweet person. Helped me get information on chakras and started introducing me to new friends. As I said on sunday night, I have a problem where I am not understood by people around me. For this reason I usually have a number of friends who I feel embody the qualities of myself that I wish to expound and understand and then I entrust those friends with all the deepest parts of me and so they entrust back providing us with a great circle of trust and understanding that developes and helps both of us grow in wisdom, understanding, and friendship. And I do this for all aspects of myself that I have and for the aspects of self that I wish to have.

I had great hopes for you, but now I must be much more careful. I was willing to entrust you with things that are the most important and dear to me feeling that you were the best suited for the task, now I must look elsewhere seeing as you are too unstable. I still would like to continue our friendship though and see where it goes.

I am sorry that I have impacted you so greatly, however I did not EVER lie to you, not ONCE. And you lied about how you felt about me and me talking to you about my issues. Think about how your lie has caused so much needless suffering.

You would have greatly benefitted from the book The Path to Enlightenment, I know because I greatly benefitted from the book and it has brought me much happiness. You have rejected that happiness and you continue to reject happiness in more issues than just the book. Now I cannot trust you with the book because it belongs to a dear friend of mine and I would fear that you would rip it up. Such negativity, and all this because I specifically tried to avoid drama. Well thanks for bringing drama into my life, I am more glad than ever that I wrote you so that I could avoid a much more serious case of it.

May peace find us despite the turmoil,
devin


I didn't reply, at my boss's urging. Devin messaged me soon after with a simple:

You have been given ample time to give me a response, your only response has been silence therefore that IS your response.

Someday fortune may again smile on you

peace out
devin





But what came next was the most interesting of all. In the next few months, many things happened. He came in contact with a close friend, called her a militant lesbian, and hung his sexual life out on a line for her. He wrote a blog detailing me to be "not the prettiest duck in the swan family" along with all types of nonsense. It was humorous to read. I'll give you a taste.



October 05, 2007

The Devin update


The last I told anybody I had met a few people, was looking for a job because the one I came over thinking I had was postponing who knows how long and I had been doing a lot of soul searching.

Since then here is what has happened to me.

First of all there is the girl Shelly. She was the girl I told everyone about being my first possible friend in Utah, she was a girl who looked 14 but was associating with our singles ward. So I brought it up, thinking that she might be the bishop's daughter or something. Turns out she is 18 and just looks young. Well even though I criticized how old she looked that same first monday she came up to me and engaged in a one on one conversation, I thought that was pretty brave to do that. She and I got to talking and eventually went on two dates.

The first date was after institute and we went out for icecream and then afterwards I went to meet her parents and spoke with her mother for a great deal and basicly gave them a version of my life story so as to prove the genuiness of my curiousity in chakras, something I was led to believe that shelly's mother was an expert in.

Second date we went to see some taxidermy and then threw a little get together at shelly's place and got into deep conversation.

That sunday I went to shelly's again and spoke with her mother some more. Here I learned that shelly's mom really was not an expert on chakras, yes she had read a little about it and she practiced some minor holistic healing practices in her life but she did not understand a great deal about the seven planes of existence and basicly she didn't understand the underlying themes of metaphysics at all, which are essential to understanding chakras, logicly not religiously. So I did my best and explained what I could over the course of an hour and a half. I pretty much got through the basic overview of everything.

Well this is still mostly old information.

The very next day I went with shelly to a local Junior high, not middle school- junior high, and applied to work as a janitor. The job SUCKED. I had to sweep a bunch of rooms and take out the garbage but the rooms were poorly set up. They all had those old school personal chair/desks and they are all tightly packed together, so it is quite an ordeal to sweep effectively inbetween all of those. They also had horribly short brush brooms and too big of push brooms. I ended up not finishing everything that I was supposed to and had such a back pain that I felt like only lying down the next two days.

Well after that I immediately knew that I was to quit that job, too painful and there was no way I could keep that up 5 days a week. That night was family home evening and we went again to the same person's house that we had a week earlier, the very same place that I met shelly and the rest of my ward, around a firepit. We had more games and then left.



That wednesday I went to institute again and twice during the time I thought that my teacher was looking for a show of hands if people had certain experiences in their lives, such as "Have you ever had a realization that you were in a bad situation" Well YES actually I have been there, so I raised my hand and he called on me to speak and all I could say is "my stories are not appropriate for this audience." Well because of such speak my institute teacher is now petrified whenever I choose to speak. He constantly worries that I might say something that I wont be able to retract which would permanently damage the group of young adults. Ridiculous.


Now apparently this bishop is pretty darn new to the ward that I am in, and new to being a bishop. But all this I figured was destiny, I knew that many mormons in Utah were so conservative it hurt but I had to trust that God put me into this single's ward for a reason and I needed to trust the bishop. So I laid it all out in a pretty concise way. (a note from Shelly, this bishop died within the next month. Best Bishop I've had)

The following is my life story as I told it to the bishop, most of you already know it so just skip past this next paragraph and read on.

(lalalalaa, you don't need to know any of this... lalalalala...)



Well the bishop was struggling to listen to all of this, it took about 15 to 20 minutes to spit it out, and he just sat there in his chair blinking at me. I knew before I went in to speak to him that he would probably have no idea how to react to me. I told him that I was really trying to improve and whatever and that I wanted to know how long, in his opinion as my bishop it would take before I could again have the sacrament and also get a patriarchal blessing (do research if you care). I also told him that my previous bishop had said that it would probably take a year before I would be able to partake of the sacrament. But that I was willing to wait however long, 5 years or more if necessary although I would hope it to be sooner rather than later.

My bishop told me that waiting a year was the most time the bishops are advised to make a person wait before taking the sacrement unless they were to excommunicate me, YIKES. And that he would need to consult my previous bishop and also think it over.

I make my bishop sound more intelligent than he really was, I actually fed him the line that he should contact my bishop and he took it as his own, as expected. He seems like a moderately simple man, but sincere so I hope for the best.


It turned out that my father was speaking as a publisher, which he is, at a writer's conference in Idaho.

Anyways we get back from the conference on Sunday early morning and I go to church, I forgot to mention that I wrote a letter Via Myspace to shelly while I was at conference.

This was the letter, it was entitiled

Because I don't like drama

Dear Shelly,

I want to write you so that I can hopefully make life easier for me. I percieve many things and I want to be able to clear things up at least in my mind and make things known before its too late.

I percieved from the first day that I met you that you were most likely attracted to me and since then this has developed into you wanting a relationship with me that involves dating.

I do not see you in any romantic sense. I am not physically attracted to you nor does your personallity attract my romantic emotions. You are a person who I instantly found was a strong personality, who appeared different from the "norm" although I could not know for sure what the "norm" in Utah is and I very much enjoy our conversations especially written ones. You have been a good friend to me and have been very supportive.

However your attraction to me is making me rather uncomfortable as I feel like I am waiting to turn you down just as soon as you muster enough courage to ask me out or suggest any kind of romantic situation between us. It is better far that I sqaush what desire you have to approach me as such now than wait till you've built yourself up for it. Logically this is true.

I do find myself more physically and mentally attracted to other individuals in our ward and in other wards I have met, but believe me that I am kind of picky when it comes to who I date as a girlfriend. I have a long list of criteria, I know EXACTLY what I want in a relationship and so because you did not fit that criteria the thought of you as my girlfriend never even crossed my mind until it became apparent that I was incited emotion inside of you.

I can deduce that you have probably not had many male friends who you were able to associate with on a regular basis. I am sorry if that was the case but I suggest that you practice with me because your friendship is all I expect out of you. I do not wish to state the things about you that make you not my criteria nor do I wish to state what is my criteria for the women I select but if it would make you feel better than I would be willing to share that with you provided that you did not disclose my response to anyone.

Now, I have personally known that someone was unavailable to me EVER and still was their friend for a long time and kept my crush. I have no problem with you feeling however you want to feel about me the only problem happens when the other girls around me start thinking that they can't touch me because you have some kind of claim on me. Now I also know that if I were to have a close friend who wanted a particular person I would choose to avoid liking that person in order to benefit my friend.

Besides any questions and or concerns you may have, please also give me a list of people you would prefer that I not try to date and I will give you my word to NEVER date them or take them on a date. I respect our friendship and would willing provide you this service.

sincerely,
devin

I feel it is self explanitory, squash it before something big happens

Her response:

Devin,

Thank you for the letter. Let's talk. You're right-- I am attracted to you, but am not going to make a move. I enjoy your friendship, and that's all I have expected since we met.

You don't scare me, but I don't feel comfortable with your background. Does that make sense? I'm not "leaving" but only because I enjoy your friendship. I have never expected you to like me or be attracted to me in any way, because you've come here for different reasons. Hahaha, I wasn't going to ask you out. Quite a bit of my hanging around you at church was that I didn't want you to be lonely, and I was aware that I was creating an impression in the ward, which I didn't want to create, but I wasn't sure that, if I let you be, then people would come and talk to you. But, obviously, after today and your comment about not worrying about being alone, I'm really fine with letting you alone.

I would like to continue our friendship, and give up the attraction. Would you feel comfortable with that? How else can I be of assistance?

I have no need to know criteria. I'll work with who I want to become, and not who you want me to become. How's that? I also don't care who you date. Haha, you could date Lyndsi, and I wouldn't care.

Was there anything else?

Oh, and you're still welcome to come with us to General Conference.

Shelly


What an AWESOME RESPONSE! A bit too formal, suggesting that she was trying hard to suppress emotion but she was deffinitely trying to believe what she was saying and I thought
"Wow, she's even more mature than I thought, how awesome!"
This made me feel that she was an EXCELLENT pick of a friend here and I was very happy to see this response.

So at church that day she grinned and bared it and we spoke for a while, had a laugh and moved on.

A couple days later at night the doorbell rings. I go answer it and it turns out to be two things
The Path to Enlightenment, which I let her borrow, in a plastic bag with a note on it that said "Obviously you need this more than I do PS We're not friends" It was in a plastic bag so that she could underline in red marker on the plastic the words "Obviously you need this more than I do" and the title of the book, plus little flame designs from the bottom of the book. It was all wrapped up nice and tight with tape on it to make sure the plastic wouldn't move so that her message was prominent.
And also a bag with the copies of three note, of no significant value, that she had copied when she gave them to me-burned in the bag, signifying her lack of care of what she wrote me?

So I didn't know the best way to respond so I wrote this:

Are you sure?

Dear Shelly,

I can feel so many emotions coming from you right now and last night I felt especially negative and did not know why. I realize now that you have been thinking highly negative thoughts about me and I want to tell you that they have reached me. My normal state of peace was so disturbed last night that I had to try and figure out a way to get rid of the negativity. It took me a little while. I now also am feeling quite negative but I also have other things which have managed to trouble me.

You do not understand what this means to me, you have willingly and knowingly wished to HARM me. I knowingly harmed you as well and probably more deeply however my intent was good. Your response showed the self strength and maturity I had hoped for and now this. Your intent is not good and not only that it is a change from what you previously stated. If you had replied to my letter honestly you would have told me of your pain and I would have gladly fulfilled my responsibility to ease the suffering I had created. You appeared let down rather than devestated and that is what I hoped to do by talking to you early and maturely. In the logic of the situation you have let me devestate your feelings, if I were to take your reaction as the way things work than I would refuse all friendship to females for the fear that they in turn would be attracted and then devestated if I told them what I told you. I will not do that however.

You will never have a friend quite like me again, are you sure you want to give that up? You may think me prideful but I want you to realisticly contemplate the situation. Have you EVER met anyone REMOTELY like me?

Regardless of whether or not you wish to be my friend I want to give you some advice, do not provoke me please. I am understanding but not all forgiving and I take the intention of a person's actions to mean a great deal.

These are the ways you can best provoke me

1 spreading negative rumors about me
2 advising people not to associate with me
3 advising people not to attend functions I will start
4 making a public show of how much you "hate" me

You mentioned that I could date lyndsi if I so wished. with new eyes I see that you are most jealous of her beauty as far as your friend circle is concerned. So her I will especially avoid and you can tell her that and share any information I have written you to anyone, that absolutely does not bother me.

But if you succeed to make an enemy out of me than my anger will be justified, you have deffinitely put me into a negative mood because I am already thinking about things I could do. I do not like such trains of thought and I sincerely do not wish to any longer.

You have been a great friend to me. Noone else took the initiative to speak one on one for a while with me other than you. You have given me rides and introduced me to your mother who is a very sweet person. Helped me get information on chakras and started introducing me to new friends. As I said on sunday night, I have a problem where I am not understood by people around me. For this reason I usually have a number of friends who I feel embody the qualities of myself that I wish to expound and understand and then I entrust those friends with all the deepest parts of me and so they entrust back providing us with a great circle of trust and understanding that developes and helps both of us grow in wisdom, understanding, and friendship. And I do this for all aspects of myself that I have and for the aspects of self that I wish to have.

I had great hopes for you, but now I must be much more careful. I was willing to entrust you with things that are the most important and dear to me feeling that you were the best suited for the task, now I must look elsewhere seeing as you are too unstable. I still would like to continue our friendship though and see where it goes.

I am sorry that I have impacted you so greatly, however I did not EVER lie to you, not ONCE. And you lied about how you felt about me and me talking to you about my issues. Think about how your lie has caused so much needless suffering.

You would have greatly benefitted from the book The Path to Enlightenment, I know because I greatly benefitted from the book and it has brought me much happiness. You have rejected that happiness and you continue to reject happiness in more issues than just the book. Now I cannot trust you with the book because it belongs to a dear friend of mine and I would fear that you would rip it up. Such negativity, and all this because I specifically tried to avoid drama. Well thanks for bringing drama into my life, I am more glad than ever that I wrote you so that I could avoid a much more serious case of it.

May peace find us despite the turmoil,
devin


Well she never responded and its been 3 days since that letter I wrote her. So I wrote this to end it.

No subject

You have been given ample time to give me a response, your only response has been silence therefore that IS your response.

Someday fortune may again smile on you

peace out
devin



So yeah, that's my drama. I don't know whether I should be surprised or not that it took this long to create drama such as this. I really am frustrated that I wasted so much time on developing our friendship. She is NOT the prettiest duck in the swan family and I could have been developing relationships with MUCH MORE attractive people however I felt that Shelly might have been the best suited to understand certain things.



peace out
devin





So, the long and shortof it is that Devin's crazy, accidentally became my home teacher, which I put a stop too, is still in my ward, and still has no friends. Some myspace friends (how we were messaging each other) from my ward actually told him, after reading the blog, that they didn't want to associate with him. HAHA!!!