How a Stranger Taught Me to Take Things Less Personally
It’s hard to be a person.
We spend our lives trapped inside one body, watching the world through the same set of binoculars, parsing information through the same channels and filters.
We turn the same thoughts over, flipping and rotating them, believing what they say—even when we shouldn’t; sometimes especially when we shouldn’t. And while we regularly try to change other people’s minds, so rarely are we able to change our own.
Considering the circumstances we find ourselves in (one body, one mind, one life), it’s no wonder we take most things personally, even when—especially when—we shouldn’t. Because, despite believing otherwise, not everything is about us. No matter how convinced we are that we’re right about something that feels wrong.
To illustrate this point, I want to tell you about something that happened to me in the 1990s, when I was in my early 20s.
(The sound of time rewinding …)
Early ’90s. East Village. Day.
GETTY IMAGES | Jena Ardell (neither of these people are me!)
I’m having a perfectly fine afternoon for a person who doesn’t have many perfectly fine afternoons at this time. I’m deeply into making cut-out poetry, gluing words and lines of my own poems onto black-and-white Xeroxes of my friend’s faces.
Words are littered all around me, I have sticky glue fingers whose tips are gray from cheap Xerox toner. The phone rings.
It is an actual phone. As in, it only does one thing: makes and receives calls. It has a coiled wire. You cannot put it in your pocket.
I pick up, say hello, and hear a stranger on the other end.
“Hey,” says the stranger.
“Hey back,” I say, assuming I’ll be able to place his voice the longer we talk.
“What are you up to?”
“Same as always. Making poems,” I say.
“I didn’t know you wrote poems,” he says.
I pause. “That’s odd,” I say. I am, after all, at this very point in my life, a published poet, with intentions on becoming a more widely published poet, as though such a thing were feasible. I talk about it a lot. Too much. Enough so that anyone I know is acutely aware of my intentions to become a MAJOR Poet of GREAT RENOWN.
“So listen, I was hoping we could talk for a minute?”
“Sure,” I say, wanting him to talk for more than a minute so I can figure out who I’m talking to. I don’t want to ask because it seems clear I should already know—he knows who I am, after all.
Plus, now it just feels a bit too late, and I am afraid I’m going to hurt his feelings, which is something I actively avoid doing at this time in life and the next couple decades because I cannot deal with people being mad at me.
“I really like you,” he says, “and I’ve been having a great time hanging out, but this just isn’t working for me anymore.”
Despite not knowing who this person is, as well as already having a boyfriend, this sentence does what that sentence is meant to do—my stomach drops. Break-up dread splashes about in my belly. I feel dislocated, surreal, and thrown off balance.
Getty Images | Jonathan Knowles
Instead of taking that moment to tell him that he has the wrong person, I get caught up, or carried away, or I am suddenly actively mad on behalf of the person he means to be breaking up with, and I decide to go to the mat for her.
“Wait. You’re breaking up with me?” I say.
“It’s not you,” he said. “It’s me.”
I roll my eyes.
“I’m just not feeling it,” he says.
“Did you ever feel it?” I ask.
Silence.
My hurt feelings gain density and form in that silence.
“So you led me on?”
“I didn’t mean to lead you on. That wasn’t my intention. I just … things changed. Something changed.”
“What changed?”
“I can’t really explain it.”
“Well, try …”
“I just don’t think we’re compatible is all.”
“In which ways?” I ask.
Silence.
The second silence stings more than the first
“You know—,” I said. Now I am pissed. “You’re right. We’re not compatible. We should break up.”
“Wait, really?”
“Yes. I would never date a man who doesn’t recognize that the voice he’s breaking up with is a stranger's and not his girlfriend's.”
Silence.
“This isn’t Dina?”
“Not even close.”
“Dude, so sorry.”
“I can’t believe you broke up with me.”
“I’m really sorry.”*
Original art by Edwina White
(Sound of fast-forwarding to present-day-me looking back)
After he hung up, I sat at my desk, slightly shook and dispirited. I looked down at my art poems and I saw my life through this stranger’s eyes.
Of course he broke up with me— I’m a loser who thinks she’s going to make money as a poet! Who would want to date someone so unserious?
I felt embarrassed for myself. So much so, I didn’t even stay in my apartment.
I walked around my neighborhood in a bad mood, hurt and feeling rejected, convinced that I wasn’t worthy of love because a stranger broke up with me.
I met up with some friends at Bar 81, and told them that I was broken up with by a stranger and we laughed about it, but I felt genuinely, weirdly hurt and practically blindsided.
Here I was, rejected by someone I never met, would never meet, did not know, and would never know, and most importantly, was not my boyfriend, and yet, I took it personally.
At the time I couldn’t make much sense of that discrepancy, but in the years since, I often think about that story because it reminds me of something vital: We often take things personally that really have nothing to do with us.
We are hurt when friends don’t return our phone calls in a reasonable amount of time and we assume that they no longer like us.
GETTY IMAGES | Tetra Images
We are hurt when we pass someone on the street who we believe has seen us but doesn’t smile or wave back.
We are hurt when we see friends together in Instagram posts because why weren’t we invited?? We are hurt when we get a last-minute invitation to a party that had clearly been planned for a while.
We get hurt a lot. But the truth is, the only person hurting our feelings is us. No one else can make anyone feel a certain way.
No one else can make you feel hurt. They can do hurtful things but the feeling is our own, and we can grow it or shrink it if we choose. Growing hurt feelings comes naturally, shrinking them doesn’t.
So the next time a stranger calls and breaks up with you, the next time someone gives you a last-minute invite or doesn’t return your wave, try to remember that it’s not personal. It’s never personal.
Even if a person deliberately hurts you, it’s not personal. That person is already hurting, and however, they lash out is their misdirected effort to relieve their pain. We have a choice to accept or deny these efforts.
GETTY IMAGES | Klaus Vedfelt
So, deny it.
Deny carrying someone else’s hurt inside you, and if you have trouble, just remember that one day a stranger broke up with me, and I chose to let it hurt my feelings when it had nothing to do with me, wasting an entire day wallowing in a despair I chose to carry.
In essence, I decided to be hurt by something that had nothing to do with me.
Decide otherwise.
And you? Do you take things personally even when it clearly has nothing to do with you?
Let me know in the comments!
Until next week I remain...
Amanda
*I don't recall the EXACT conversation, so I've reconstructed it based on memory. What's most vital is that a stranger broke up with me on the phone.
(Nope, I'm not a therapist or medical professional. I'm just a human being who has spent most of her life trying to figure out how to live.)
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