Don't Let Emotion Rule Your Life

Emotion, left unchecked, has a way of bleeding into everything near it. Think of a pebble dropped into a pond and the rings that keep widening from the point of impact. Your foul mood at breakfast, the one set off because nobody flipped the switch on the coffeepot timer and now there's no coffee, might travel further than you'd ever guess. Picture it reaching a city bus where a driver, already short on patience, boots a mother and her sick child for not having exact change. Snapping at someone who had nothing to do with your problem might give you a flicker of relief, but that kind of thing passes from one person to the next and sours the day for everyone it touches. If you're hurting, I'm genuinely sorry for that. Just don't make the wrong person pay for it.

There's another place where people hand their emotions too much power, and it has to do with attraction. A feeling of desire belongs to the person having it, not to whoever happened to spark it. Women tend to run into this more often, usually on the receiving end of unwanted and inappropriate advances. On a Greyhound bus once, a man tried to grope me. I said nothing, but I wedged my belongings between us and switched seats at the next rest stop. The same thing happened to me with a man who was my supervisor, and again with one who was my doctor. Both were married, I believe, and I was single at the time.

What stays with me is a retreat I once spent with a group of women, most of them lesbian, where not one pass was made at me and no one touched me inappropriately, regardless of what we were doing or how much or how little we were wearing. I'm nothing more than an average woman. The film Fatal Attraction put this dynamic on screen from the opposite angle: a woman who becomes fixated on a man who chased her first and then pushed her away. The responsibility for a feeling sits with the one who holds it.

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