I was able to
completely not care when some people said some mean things to me.
At first I was confused as to why they'd bother, then I remembered all the comment sections on all the internet containing all that hate, and my confusion just faded into complete indifference.'' I couldn't have cared less what was said or thought on that topic and it was a massive improvement for me. It was so freeing.
I used to be really bothered by stuff like that. I took everything in life rather seriously and to heart, and that mistake just about ruined me. The world can be cruel, and often was to me (as I imagine it is to others as well). I keep getting more and more mileage out of this article:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-ways-to-keep-terrorists-from-ruining-world/I am considering writing Mr. Wong a thank you note of some kind. My brain is (overly) analytical, and it tries to understand things. Ordinarily, this is adaptive, but not when dealing with things that don't understand themselves, like internet hate or its real world equivalent. My brain can't understand these things because there's nothing to understand. People want to bitch and they're going to no matter what I do or don't do. That took me forever to really understand.
I never understood, "It's not personal," when people told me not to let stuff like this bother me. I was expected to understand this advice and the implications. I didn't, but maybe I do now. The point is that the person complaining is mad at something, or everything and they'd complain about it no matter who was near them. This is important, because as somebody flings insults at you in this situation, they're just flinging at anything around them. They would do this NO MATTER WHO WAS AROUND THEM. <--- That's the key to understanding why people told me "it's not personal" to explain why I shouldn't get upset in this situation. It isn't me the person is mad at really.
Now, is it unfair that the other person is acting like that? Probably, but this information doesn't help me. It doesn't change anything and the only thing I can control is my reaction. Here, I have very limited contact with the person in question and I can avoid them easily. I might see them again, but I am thankfully not forced to see them all the time. Reacting at all to this person will not make me happy, and the chance of any reaction they'd produce making me happy is slim to nil. Conversely, they would probably make me very unhappy if I reacted to them. It wouldn't help.
This time, I was able to let it all go as completely irrelevant and chose not to remember what they said. "Ignoring" implies an active disregard or effort and there's none. There's no strain not to care here, and that's an important improvement for me, because that wasn't always the case.
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Topic: Things that made you feel better today. (Read 24496 times)