Nothing happened

A meeting I used to be in started happening without me. Nobody mentioned it. I never asked.

That is the whole story. There is nothing else to it, which is why I could not say it to anybody.

It takes different forms. You hear about something after it is settled rather than while it is being decided. Somebody else is asked to present work you did. Each one is too small to raise. Say something and you look insecure over nothing.

And you cannot take it anywhere, because the first thing anybody asks is what happened. Nothing happened. So you end up describing a feeling instead of a fact, and the person you are telling gives up halfway through and says it probably does not mean anything.

It usually means something. Not the meeting itself. What it told you. That something had changed and nobody was going to say so.

I did not see at the time how fast you adjust. You absorb one of these, then the next, and after a while you have stopped noticing them at all.

I spent years treating this kind of thing as not worth anybody’s time, including mine. I was wrong about that. The ones with nothing to point at are the ones that stay. There is no way to settle them.

They still need saying out loud once, to somebody who is not going to ask you what happened.