Read This When You Don’t Understand Why People Are Unkind
People take on the characteristics of those who have most deeply hurt them. Within their unkindness, they are actually revealing to you the shape of their wound. What they have done to you says far more about them than it does about you.
Your choice becomes whether or not you will allow the shape of that wound to perimeter off your own peace; whether or not you will choose to engage it, inflame it, and over time, adopt it as your own. Your choice is whether or not you will allow those characteristics to impress themselves upon you, whether or not you will be a pattern-breaker or enter yourself into the karmic free-fall.
When you react, you concede. You start playing by their rules and if you are not careful, you will begin living within them. They become you, indistinguishable from your former sense of self and truth. They become your framework, your safe zone. If you continue to engage, the perception of who you are allowed to be and what you are allowed to do will continue to shrink until it feels as though nothing is safe and there is nowhere to go.
This does not excuse another person’s behavior toward you, it does not justify it or make it more whole. It is just the acknowledgement that you cannot control it or them, and so your work begins in your own arena. It is your response that will determine the nature of this moment, of this disruption, of this difficulty.
It is your response that will shape your life.
When someone sees another person living outside of the wound perimeter in which they are currently existing, their openness scratches the place where their hurt still sits. Their existence is bothersome, because it is a reminder. It is a reminder of all the ways they’re living within the limitations, imagining that they would keep them safe. Though of course, it only suffocates them further.
When those same people see others not abiding by their fears—the agreements they unconsciously made to play small—all of the repressed energy that’s gone unused sometimes wells up and projects outward, when what it really wants to do is infuse inward and go forward.
What this moment is asking of you is that you become more capable of identifying when people are acting from their unconscious spaces and to choose not to level yourself in response. What this moment is asking of you is for you to start paying attention to your own responses and reactions, to also begin settling into the knowing that we often don’t see people as they are, but as we are. Our filter and interpretation is a lens that adjusts over time. It shifts to match where we see ourselves.
Some people come into our lives to encourage us, to guide us, to be companions on the journey. Others come as reminders of the ways in which we have surrendered our autonomy, our power. Others come as reminders of who we might become if we do not change our ways. Others come to reflect the unseen parts of ourselves back to ourselves; and they, too, are guides in their own ways. Teachers.
Some people come into our lives just to show us who we do not want to be.
If you have come across one of them, please do not allow their jadedness to steal your kindness, your warmth. Please remain supple, open to the world and its offerings, its greater plan for you.
Please take this as a chance to decide you will not pick up more baggage just because someone else is carrying a heavier load. Please take this as a chance to firm up your boundaries, your resolve. Please take this as a moment to know that you do not owe anyone your grace, certainly not those who have been ungracious to you; but you do owe it to yourself.
You owe it to yourself to remain untouched by all the ways in which the world will attempt to harden you. You owe it to yourself to proceed.
You owe it to yourself to determine the kind of person you want to be and how that person will allow themselves to be treated. Not in the sense of declaring and fighting for their limits, but communicating them most effectively by what they will and will not engage with, what they will and will not enable.
That is what’s in front of you at this most unlikely moment. I hope you choose your peace.
