It’s Not About You (Except When It Is)
Recently, I was at a charity event and passed a frequent acquaintance of mine (let’s call him Bob). As I stopped to greet him, Bob candidly acknowledged that he did not remember my name. I was surprised but not upset by this. In truth, I’d been anxious about the encounter because Bob was a friend of an adversary of mine, and I feared he would have a negative view of me based on that. When, in truth, not only did Bob not dislike me, he didn’t think of me enough to even remember my name.
Unrealized expectations or unnecessary anxiety about potential encounters happen all the time. It might be an old school acquaintance staring blankly at your knowing glance when you cross paths in the office, or a former colleague not putting two and two together about why you look familiar you’re your carts cross at the grocery store.
People are busy, and people are naturally focused on their own lives. Too often, we worry that people are constantly thinking about us, judging us, or caring about what we’re doing, when in fact almost always they are not. Just as I am the central character in my own story, everyone else is the protagonist of their own stories, and understanding that is important to the process of maturing and leaving behind the inescapable self-regard of youth.
This should be very freeing in theory. But too often for me, it’s had the opposite effect. I’ve wasted a lot of time over the past decade bemoaning the loss of friendships, chasing ghosts of relationships that were no longer worth it. In fact, I should have been celebrating that these former friends had stopped caring. What a gift for someone to be honest about how little you matter to them rather than dragging things out! Why in the world would you want to continue engaging with someone who didn’t even like you? As I searched my soul, I realized that the losses hurt my ego but didn’t impact my quality of life at all. Not spending time with these people was no loss at all, and once I realized that, the sting was gone. Along my own very different path, I’d come to the same place as them. It just took me longer to realize it.
So the lesson is to stop worrying about what others think and focus on your own life. Great advice, but as with every other broad life lesson, there are narrow but important exceptions. Even though the overwhelming majority of people are not thinking about you, on certain rare occasions you will encounter someone who is not only focused on you but has ill intentions towards you. Whether the person perceives you as a threat or is just casually cruel, or some combination thereof, you can get burned if you aren’t aware of and protecting yourself against those who intend to do you harm.
When most people encounter a person like this, the type of person I’ll call a Viper, they can react one of three ways. They can align with the Viper to benefit from the Viper’s power. They can avoid the Viper at all costs so as to not get caught in the strife and drama. It’s no wonder why people choose these two options. Life is hard and exhausting, and the last thing any of us have time for is some unnecessary tension or drama.
The third option is to confront the Viper. I’m a Viper confronter, a product of the value I place on fairness, and I’ve been hurt and marginalized often as a result. But if we are going to make things better in our society, more of us need to stand up to the Vipers, whether they’re involved in local politics, an office, or a club.
When you do confront a Viper, you’ll often find that people who appeared to be the Viper’s biggest supporters were often aligning out of self-interest or avoiding out of fear. And your decision to make a courageous stand won’t have hurt your standing with those people at all. Instead, it hopefully might inspire them to confront the Vipers in their lives the next time.
Or they might not even think about you at all. And that’s ok too.
