Are some things left better unsaid?….

I know that they say
That somethings are better left unsaid

-Justin Timberlake on “Cry Me a River”

I have recently been asking myself the question of are some things better if they are not said and I’m still torn between yes and no answers. The reason why I ask this is that for one real life example, it was hard to understand why I wasn’t told I had the chance of having something and nothing was ever communicated to me. I just recently found out I have Polycystic Kidney Disease, which is hard to take in but I’m trying my best now to prevent my cysts from enlarging and also taking medication. Now, the strange thing is that my nephrologist had to be the one to tell me that I had this and not someone else. I knew from my CT scan that I had cysts but I didn’t know that it would be so severe in both my kidneys. My nephrologist said that there were multiple cysts in both kidneys and I was wondering why there wasn’t anything done when I was younger as she had told me that I had them dating back to when I first had stones in my kidneys. She said since there was never real complications with these stones then there wasn’t any reason to worry about the cysts. I was kind of taken aback by the fact that I did have this disease and then she said that this disease is hereditary which shocked me because my mom had never really told me the extent of why she had high blood pressure as well. I went home kind of stunned and a little shocked but when I asked my mom I got my answer. She said she had it, three of sisters had it, a brother of her’s, and also one of my cousins which shocked me even more. I didn’t know what to say as I was acting beforehand as if I was the only one that had it. My mom then stated that she didn’t want to overwhelm me with anything and that they had found cysts in her kidney when she was pregnant with me so at the time she was about 24, which is the same age that I have been diagnosed with it. I’ve been asking myself ever since then, was it right for her not to tell me? I can see where she could have admitted to me outright when I was 13 that it was possible that I had cysts, as this was the age that I had first had kidney stones. When someone is young and vibrant, I can see that parents don’t want anything to harm their kids and they are just hiding the truth from them and if I was in that position, it would most definitely not be an easy choice. But, what really makes up truth? They were being truthful when my kidney stones were present and they knew what it was but I can’t say that some variation of the truth wasn’t told to me. As I keep growing, I have noticed that you become much less protected but also you get more responsibilities and more accountability. Growing up, I never did bad things, hardly got in trouble, and also tried to have as much fun as possible. This was probably one of the reasons why my mom never told me because she didn’t want to stop that fun and she also wanted the best possible living for her son. Being naive also contributed to my mom possibly not telling me about my cysts because (1) the disease is hereditary and I can’t do anything about it and (2) I didn’t know that so many bad things could contribute to a disease. So, in this case yes some things are better left unsaid because you want to protect someone and you also want to let that other person be themselves while also being a good person. But what about another situation: this one is also a real life example in which it can be either a hindrance or a helping hand. Last week, I was talking to an assistant at the big red machine and he is very open sometimes about the problems and the presence of what communication goes on there. I was interested in what he said because it gave me an inside on how much real work these assistants have to do and how the managers are just like producers on a TV show. Think of it this way, the assistants are writers on a TV show but the managers are producers of the show. Now, the writers work very hard to get storylines on TV, create characters, write themes, but ultimately the producers have to sit there and come up with something. The producers, in this case, dictate what gets on Tv and what doesn’t. He talked about the downgrade of workers he has there and how much downhill it has gone because whenever he works with the team, they end up hating him. I told him, out of mutual respect and position, that he is in a tough position because it is almost like a cycle where the workers make the assistant look good and the assistant makes the manager look 10 times better. But, here’s the thing, I see that when the team the assistant works with does well, almost all the managers (with the exception of 1 or 2) seem like they are the types to build up their selves instead of the assistant. But, whenever the team does bad, all the blame goes to the assistant and the workers get little to no heat for this. I understand that managers have finished their degrees up at developmental while assistants have little to any aspiration of finishing school. He let out his frustrations that the managers want things done their way and they can’t be creative in any way possible. This surprised me because I first would let out my frustrations with the idiocy that some of the assistants had but after a little more talking to, I have a vast amount of respect for most of them. He seemed intent on being able to raise that bar of workrate and I understood from that conversation that no matter how well of a job you do, it always has to be held to that standard and nothing less. As a good friend of mine used to say that worked there, “once you’re labeled, it sticks”. And I learned from that letting your frustrations set in about a job is unsettling because you really have no reason to do so. It is good, (sometimes) to let your problems because, let’s face it no one goes on in life without there share of problems and their weaknesses as well. I was optimistic about that conversation and the way it went because not many of the assistants are apt to say what they feel and rather they go on saying what they think in the long term. In this case, I was happy because it allowed me to see that most of these people are human and I wish they were each like this instead of one person being a clone of the next one. Somethings are better left not unsaid  I hope people can keep being like this. Till Next Time!