Part of ‘dear almost everything’— a series of letters on becoming.
This piece is also available in audio, if you prefer listening over reading. :)
i sometimes leave the toilet seat up. i don’t feel regret over it in the moment, or even several days later. but when it’s subtly brought up in the family meetings i feel angry.
‘right, like berate the one person who has done like one mistake in the entire week.’
the same week i forget to refill the bottles i’ve used from the refrigerator. i sometimes use my brother’s charger to charge my ipad while my phone is charging on mine. would i let him anywhere near my charger? that’s debatable.
on the other hand, my brother says he’ll do something and then forget about it an hour later. it fills me with rage watching him sprawled on the couch when i asked him to help me with putting away the heavy suitcase on the top shelf. my mind calls him lazy and irresponsible.
but when i do the same things, my mind argues, ‘i’m tired. can someone else do it? am i the only person in this house?’
there’s a term for this type of bias. in social psychology it is called Fundamental Attribution Error. Big words, big phrases. It was coined by Lee Ross after a 10 year experiment by Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris in 1967.
What it says is that, we tend to attribute personality flaws to another person’s mistakes, like calling someone lazy for being late while the person might have been stuck in traffic. Or saying the cashier was rude while he had been dealing with difficult customers all morning.
i hate shopping in local shops in charminar. a historical shopping hub in between the old city of hyderabad. while it is a great experience for people with unimaginable patience, i find it exhausting. the shopkeepers are rude, dismissive and some even out right roll their eyes at you. not joking one bit.
it’s like they are actively trying to decrease their shop sales.
Fundamental Attributive Error would make me wonder why they were so bad at their jobs. But in reality they might have been struggling with the harsh summer heat, having to sit all day long in their shops hoping to take enough back home, while customers bargain to the sinch.
same goes for us in our lives. when a friend doesn’t show up for us when we need them, we can be quick to attribute certain characteristics to their behavior. we start plotting a whole story in our mind with whatever little information we have and subconsciously start distancing ourselves from them. in reality they might have been dealing with their own personal demons.
i learned i was infact a problem in the thick of social prosperity. i was not only doing very well in my education aspect but also somehow had learned to balance my social life with my demanding degree.
i thought i had it figured out what i needed to do in order to keep my friends happy. have a quick anecdote or two, make them laugh a lot, smile when i see them, you know the drill.
but what i had mistaken as a curtesy friend of a friend interaction was mistaken for friendship by the other person. so when i heard something and said something, for the fear of using the word ‘gossip’ and be branded as the devil’s incarnate, they were deeply hurt.
i’m not absolving myself of the crime, of course. it taught me how my behavior can affect people and that i’m not just a product of all successful social interactions combined. the fall out was hard. and confusing. because i never was really treated as an exclusive friend. i just sort of happened to trudge along, as a friend of a friend.
but i was the villain. and it was a painful month of being put in this role for the first time in my life. it made me fear social interactions of any capacity because i clearly hadn’t understood anything about them. i remember vaguely writing in my journal, ‘i used to be a cunt, now i’m painfully quiet.’
two people can perceive a situation very differently. a thousand lives are being lived in a person’s mind at any given second. they could be replaying fights from their past life, regrets playing in the background of their mind, reminiscing in the nostalgia of an old love.
we see life through the lens of our experiences which results in a kaleidoscope which we call ‘reaction’. the phrase ‘hurt people, hurt people’ still holds good for this argument.
i’ve had a series of friendships i was all alone in, taken advantage of, and talked about behind my back. which i would argue and put it away as human nature at the age of adolescence. i was the girl who was shared glances about and in reaction i shared glances about someone else.
because i didn’t know how else to react. i absorbed the hatred around me and threw it out to the world. the first person to catch it was one unlucky bastard.
when you go through long periods of your life being betrayed by the one person you called your best friend, you adopt this ideology that you have to prove your worth to them. that you have to change their mind somehow.
so in the past, when i was stood up, used by her admirers as a plus one to make fun of, lied to, and had my texts ignored while someone else was being vent to, i came to the realization that i didn’t deserve this hurt.
when i could receive a hurt i didn’t deserve no one should stop me from passing it on to some other innocent bystander. this was the belief i was carrying within me. now that i look at my past self, wondering what she did to deserve a typhoon of a friend, and to be turned into a person seething with hatred, i feel sorry for my past self.
growing out of hurt is not an overnight journey. its not snapping your fingers and expecting that person to be hurt just as they hurt you.
it’s sitting at the carnage of your lost friendships over the years and wondering which exact events led to the one painful ‘friend of a friend situation’.
see, i had it all wrong. i was looking for absolution in my relationships. i was expecting raw honesty and commitment from someone i was still hiding parts of myself from.
people can smell that. when you hold back, hide your self behind the walls of shame and regret, they will smell it on you.
i was being mirrored in my friendships. i was getting exactly what i was giving out.
when this realization hit me like a truck, i had to sit myself down and recalculate. i knew this was not the type of life i was picturing in my mind.
i was the girl that wanted brunch dates with girlfriends, doing quality checks on cups of coffee we just spent an absurd amount of money on, to help each other out, and build a community.
all this time, i was not fully capable of giving what i expected from people.
so i retraced my steps. became quiet. spoke less often, dissolved in the background. hoped nobody was looking at me for too long or they’d notice the sneer on my face or the baring of my teeth.
i busied myself in books and hobbies that sometimes didn’t give me the satisfaction i expected after seeing people enjoying it so much. i avoided eye contact, held back a smile or two, ducked when someone was looking for me.
i’m sure my friends noticed. even if they did they didn’t make me feel bad about it. i still laugh with them in the morning sunlight of our little cafe in our college campus. i still get texts from them when we’re having a combined panic attack over exam weeks.
i’ve made my circle small to teach myself how to love people and not hurt them in the process of building a community. i’m teaching myself to not be ashamed of myself and to find a sliver of self-love and hold on to it.
this is a poem i came across by dae from one of my ‘dear substack’ notes, i’m so glad i found it.
LMAO this was one of the first articles i had read on here and it’s safe to say it rewired me.
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