I have posted a bunch of sappy stuff about love recently, in honor of Valentine’s Day. I’m a cheerleader for kindness, forgiveness, empathy, and compassion. I will defend those higher values until the day I drop dead. I really do believe in the ideas I’ve been writing about, but I also believe it’s a sign of a healthy mental state to face and deal with other, less sweet-and-gushy, feelings. As human beings, we all have what I will call moments of feeling darkly—those times when we encounter rudeness, unfairness, betrayal, injustice, etc. We feel more darkly when these negative things we encounter are such that we can’t (or think we can’t) really do anything to change what we see. We struggle with the way things are. We have emotional responses to these situations that are natural but not especially nice. Don’t feel guilty about feeling “not especially nice.” I suggest you acknowledge your feelings, figure out why you feel them, and then move on. If you can do something to fix the situation that upsets you, do. If you can’t, keep on truckin’, as we used to say in the 70’s. Been there, felt that.
There’s a trick I came up with in order to accomplish just this. It might not work for you, but I swear by it. If I’m in the midst of a situation in which someone is promoting contention, I talk to myself in my head. More specifically, I say not-nice things privately to myself. Outwardly, I will be as civil as the situation allows. I will try to talk the contention-maker down to a dull roar. But at some point, if it’s clear this person is hell-bent on being contentious to others, I give myself permission to rant in my head—while remaining polite. If a person is being a jerk, I give myself permission to repeat a mantra like, “You’re being a jerk” over and over again, out loud inside my brain. It is true that sometimes I say—in my head—words that are a bit stronger than “jerk.” I make no apologies for doing this. It makes me feel better without creating more contention by throwing fists or by running my mouth directly at someone else. Generally, if I just acknowledge and respect my not-nice feelings, these not-nice feelings pass. In most instances, there’s no reason to ruin a relationship about it.
Here’s an example of what I’m saying. In the late 80’s, I had a spiky short hairdo with one small tail of neon hair down to my right shoulder. I was in my mid-20’s at the time. I was with a friend (also in her 20’s) at Trolley Square in SLC, when we ran into her mother. It was the first time I had met my friend’s mother, so she introduced me. I said to the mother I was glad to meet her and stuck out my hand to shake hers—you know, I was polite. My friend’s mother kept her hands to her side and immediately asked me, “Do you really think you can meet Jesus with hair like that?” Now I know for a fact that I had never used the spikes in my hair to stab anyone or poke their eyes out or pick a lock to steal stuff. And I know for a fact that my neon yellow or pink or blue hair-tail never strangled anybody. Sadly, I had dealt with people like this before, so it didn’t startle me. I said to my friend’s mother, “The Jesus I am familiar with is busy dealing with real problems like hate and poverty and fear and hopelessness. The Jesus I know isn’t a busybody judging people’s hair.” I don’t remember how the conversation went after that, but I do remember that talking to myself, repeating “You are a jerk,” over and over again in my own noggin, helped me remain relatively civil in the situation. I knew the mother for many years after that and I grew to appreciate her for her other, less judgmental qualities. No matter the style of my hair during the more than decade I knew my friend’s mother, I always knew that in her eyes, my head hairs and I were never worthy of meeting Jesus. Oh well. I’m not worried.
The first three paragraphs of this post set the context for this afternoon’s “coded” Tie o’ the Day. It’s an uber-easy code to break, with only two words to be deciphered. (I realized as I was writing this that I’ve never actually said these two specific words together out loud to a person in my life.) The idea I’m trying to explore in this post is that it is sometimes fitting to feel not-nice about a not-nice situation or a not-nice person. It doesn’t make you a bad person to get fed-up with something. It is, however, usually better to deal with the raggedy feeling yourself, rather than lash out directly at someone in the heat of the moment. Egos get bruised that way. Pride gets injured. Even the most helpful, insightful point gets lost in translation under such circumstances. Saying things only to myself and/or wearing this Tie o’ the Day at strategic times can help me remain composed in life’s mean chaos: I’m subtly registering my dissent by expressing an authentic not-nice emotion, without causing emotional injury to someone else’s fragility. It’s a strategy which works effectively for me. 👁 💜 U’all