Most of us experience a time (or many times) in our life when we may feel slighted by someone or have our feelings hurt. Perhaps we’re feeling ignored or left out.
While sometimes the person may actually be upset with us, I’m going to speculate that the vast majority of the time, those little slights aren’t even about us, but are rather about something that’s going on with the other person.
Maybe they’re distracted due to some stressor in their life or maybe they just didn’t hear you when you said hello.
Without being in their life, it’s impossible to know what is really going on with them, and I’d suggest we don’t spend a lot of our time or precious life energy trying to figure it out, mostly because things aren’t always what they seem.
For example…
A while back I began to feel slighted and left out because no one was responding to any of my posts on Facebook. It was after a big political issue, and although I generally try not to bring politics to Facebook, I wasn’t holding back on this particular issue.
So since no one would so much as reply to the simplest of posts, I figured that I must have really pissed off everyone, even those who were in agreement with me.
Then I began to feel bitter. Screw them if they got pissed at me expressing my opinion. Free speech and all that. To hell with them. I didn’t need them anyway.
Finally I got an email from Denise asking me if I was OK since she hadn’t heard from me in a while.
Suddenly I began to wonder if perhaps it wasn’t that the entire free world was pissed at my political outspokenness, but maybe my posts weren’t reaching anyone.
After some investigation, I discovered that only one single person was receiving my Facebook posts.
Talk about feeling sheepish after all that bravado.
Here’s what happened. When I posted a Golden Girls light switch plate cover from Etsy on a friend’s Facebook page, I thought that I was preventing all of my Facebook friends from seeing the only that post. I mean, really, how many Golden Girls fans are there in the world?
Turns out that what really happened was that I changed my profile so that only that one person would receive any of my posts.
Kind of funny when you think of how bent out of shape I got about nothing at all. Ridiculous and hilarious when you think that all of this was about a Golden Girls switch plate, not about my political views!
Any chance some of your hurts could be about something equally insignificant or irrelevant?
You’ll probably feel better if you assume the best and not always the worst. And if you’re still having trouble considering that as an option, think about the Golden Girls switch plate.