One of the skills that would benefit me, yet I know not where or how I
would cultivate it, is to gently disarm those who do not, because they
will not, understand that what they see is a reflection of what they
have seen first with their own mind, what is a projection onto the world
of their thoughts, feelings and attitudes that preoccupy them.
These people are too much work for me right now. They might not
understand how exhausting they are. As emotions draw attention to
spectacle, and self-examination is a rare trait, they solicit drama and
will extract what drama and controversy they imagine is in an evaluative
statement like:
"I don't know what is going on here."
or
"I'm leaving early, this is not what I need right now. Have a good
evening."
I recognize that it's empowering to the ego to feed ourselves the notion
we're being victimized. Objective onlookers don't understand the
following though:
"She's pre-occupied with her cousin and cat dying, her husband losing
her job in the same week. Therefore her preoccupation is an attack on me
because she's not feeding my ego like she used to."
"This is your responsibility for asking to invite (and we agreed as a
majority to accept) someone who tried to make a self-effacing joke as a
response to someone's haughty misperception. Never mind that you on
someone else's request retracted the invitation for space
considerations."
"The use of 'horrifically' to modify the statistic mention of 34
people murdered by firearms is understood to be an adverb of a 'shrug'
as in 'what's the big deal'?"
"So what about your forty-five minute surgery? Sure you and the
dermatologist you consulted THOUGHT it was melanoma, but it turned out
to NOT be melanoma.
Why can't you direct energy to my losses? It's not enough for me to post
about my losses on Twitter, I'll copy and paste them to you."
