Dear Ed:

“Sorry” – no need to be sorry, you did nothing wrong to me.

“I will now stop posting questions you cant answer“- of course I can’t read minds: I can’t retroactively read her thoughts (what she thought in the past) any more than I can read her thoughts now, wherever she is. Also, I never communicated with her and all I have is a 3rd person’s limited account of her. But I believe in the accuracy of the quotes you provided (her words said to you), and I know a thing or two about human motivations and behaviors, and therefore I can come up with possibilities and how likely this or that may be true.

“Then why didn’t she just tell me? Even just saying ‘depression is bad right now’ would have made me understand so much and I would not have asked further” – likely because she didn’t know and couldn’t predict that at a later time you would want her to.. retroactively say this or that. At the time she had different thoughts in her mind and a different clarity than what you would have like her to have. It is neither possible or fair to .. sort of invade her brain and decide what her brain should think and say at any moment in time.

It’s something like this: you can come up with fictional characters to a fictional story and proceed to develop a plot: it is you, the author, who decides what each character thinks, feels, says and does. You can author Fiction, but you can’t author Reality: you can’t decide what her feelings and her thoughts should be, how aware she is at any moment to what she feels, and how clear or confused she is at any time. (In reality, you can’t adequately author what you think and feel, how confused or clear you are at any time, can you?)

“I only wanted to know what was going on, why would she hand me that list instead?” – likely because it was very difficult for her to tell you, and easier to list what she wanted to tell you and hand you the list. Handing you the list does not mean that she thought less of you, or that she wanted to hurt your feelings.

“Does that mean that I was the one who made her depression worse?“- that one, I don’t know. I am guessing that from one point on, you didn’t make it better.

“Why would she tell her friends about how she was feeling but not me?” – Likely because it was easier for her to talk to them than to you. Maybe when she talked to you before, too often you got defensive, took what she said very personally, and/ or criticized her: telling her that she should have said things the way she did, that she should have said things differently.

“I would like to continue our conversation“-  fine with me!

anita