Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Weekly I come up against a dilemma about scheduling something with a friend.  I have this lifelong habit of agreeing with the friend about a time for a movie, say, when it is actually inconvenient for me.  I go, build up a bit of resentment, but seldom am able to speak up for myself.  My inner grumbling kicks in.  My friends usually pick times and dates that really work for them, but that amount of assertiveness makes me nervous when I try it.

So I've been thinking:  what is at the bottom of this?  I have perfectly delightful friends, and all of them are able to be flexible.  Yet I somehow cannot ask that of them.  The other day, my husband was asking me where I'd lived as a child and how long in each place.  I noticed that after 5 years in one city, I next lived two years in the south, then two years in California.  And for the first time I realized fully that not only was it traumatic to have moved in my sophomore year of high school from a one building 1-12 school to a high school of 5,000, but that these early moves, when I was five, then seven, then nine, caused me to be friendless and be pretty desperate to make friends.  I had to be the flexible one, to stand out, to be so engaging that kids wanted to play with me.  It was part of my survival technique, to be accommodating.

But like a lot of old habits, it's not doing me any good now.  I need not fear rejection because I don't accept the first good date for a friend.  I can speak up and we can work out a time mutually beneficial.  My friends have mostly been friends for decades, and we've weathered disagreements, cooling off periods and great talks when we cleared up misunderstandings about who we are.  It's pretty crazy to think I need to continue to fear rejection.  For that's where it began:  in fear of not having friends or losing them.  I've been going around with a mental age of about five.  Oh, dear.

I'm going to practice being assertive more.  In a pleasant way.  I'll just say, "I could possibly do that, but it makes my day very tight, and I'd rather enjoy our time together without the stress.  Is there another time and day that would work equally well for us?"  There.  Now that wasn't so hard.  We'll see how it goes when I'm really speaking to another person.