Don't Let Other People Get You Down
Are you the observant type? Sensitive, maybe, or quick to absorb what's happening with the people near you? Some of us get our parade rained on again and again. Fear, frustration, anger: nearly every bad mood travels, jumping from one person to the next like a cold. And when you land in the middle of someone else's storm, a quiet question shows up. Do you owe it to them to stay? I used to answer yes almost every time.
In my whole life I have walked out of exactly one movie. Usually I sit through the whole thing because I bought the ticket, or because a friend swore it was worth seeing, and I wouldn't back my own read on it. There was one film, though, that held me completely. Three hours long, and I never shifted in my seat. By the time the credits rolled I could barely stand up, and my body let me know about it for a while afterward.
Over the years I have gotten good at steering clear of people, strangers especially, when I can see one approaching with a cloud hanging over them. Their trouble isn't mine. I would rather not get pulled into it. In my work I've had people show up for an evaluation and I could tell almost on sight that they planned to file a complaint about me with whatever agency sent them.
Often it's not even the person being evaluated. It's a parent, a relative, somebody who sees me as a professional to knock down a peg. They want to catch me out, to prove me wrong, maybe to land me in hot water. With people like that I've pulled my head into my shell and gone quiet, turtle-style, refusing to call out their attitude, because calling it out was exactly the fight they came looking for.
Then there are the poor-me types, the ones who hand you their problems one after another with the real goal of showing you nothing can be fixed. The two of you sink lower together. Nothing improves. By the end you may have slid further back than where you started.
Try not to be a mirror for other people's troubles. Don't drink in their bad feelings and walk away carrying the weight yourself.
The flip side matters too. Watch out for the person selling you on something with too much enthusiasm, the kind that pushes you into a choice you can't undo. Buy yourself room. Say you need a minute, that you want to sleep on it, that you'll circle back. Better still, say it isn't yours to decide alone: you have to run it by your spouse, your boss, your financial planner, whoever else has a stake in it.
Real feeling is a different thing, and sharing it can be wonderful, whether what you're sharing is joy or loss. I once sat and cried with one of my daughters over a relationship she'd lost, and I have never once wished I hadn't. Letting a feeling be seen can knit people closer. The opposite extreme, the cold fish who seems to care about nothing, isn't the answer either. There are people who can't taste their own food, and the meal is wasted on them.
Delight spreads the same way the bad stuff does. Have you ever laughed until you couldn't pull in a breath? One of the most somber people I've ever known was raised in an orphanage. Food, shelter, grown-ups who did their jobs: none of that was missing. What the place never gave back was feeling shared between people, and the absence of it followed into adulthood.