I've been kind.
"It's not enough to be kind. You have to fit in, too."

I've been capable.
"It's not enough to be capabld. You have to fit in, too."

Such sentences creep into my mind when I'm hovering between sleep and waking. You know, in the hours of grief. When you wonder why . Why am I so seldom able to interpret my own situation? Why don't I understand the interplay between people, that is so obvious to others?

In my local coffee shop I sometimes pick up fragments of discussions. Then I try to reconstruct whole situations. In these, there may be the keys to the complicated connections of our civilisation.

It may sound like this:

"Charming. That's what they said of me. The others, I used to like them. Until they wanted to send me away. Two weeks in a peaceful cottage, very secluded and quiet. All I had to do was take the car and drive off. Peaceful and quiet, lots of oxygen and fresh air.

Burnt out. They said I was burnt out. And it was actually wonderful to be left in peace, alone, in silence. But something was a bit odd. The neighbour was all too helpful. She also had a key. It made me feel uncomfortable."

Some fragmentary pieces of information and my brain is already working. The paranoid thoughts don't want to go away. What was the discussion about, over and above what was stated in words?

A person is considered to be "burnt out" by his colleagues. Are there unspoken emotions, hatreds even, under the apparently perfect surface of the place of work?

It's funny how one thing leads to another. How reality sort of slips away. How you suddenly find yourself in an unexpected situation and already accept it as something normal. How you feel that it will slip away even further, how you know that you'll also accept the next change and the next.

Because you're part of what's happening.

Carl Johan De Geer