By Jill MacGregor
You are driving me up the wall. I see right through your bravado—I think the only one you’re fooling is you. And the neediness. It makes me want to push you off like a slime. Everything’s a refusal with you, a no it won’t work, a that’s not important to me when, of course, it’s important to everyone.
Your fear. Your pretense. Your rules, your unnecessary rules. I just want you to embrace things willingly. I want you to stop making excuses and start doing things you’re afraid of.
Wow, can you smell the intolerance? So attractive.
If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to become different yourself.
Norman Vincent Peale
Just as we have those tender spots that we don’t want others to touch, some people in our lives seem to have those prickly, pointy characteristics that chafe us like bad corduroy on a cold winter day.
Why, why why —we can be so tolerant of near strangers and so intolerant people we know so well?
And those things they do. (shake with exasperation)
Let me take a moment to clarify. I encourage you to be intolerant to liars, rude bastards, cheats, bullies and others of the ilk. I’m talking about smaller imperfections that grow and build over time to annoy us.
Sometimes it’s hard to allow the people who make us crazy an opportunity to change. We freeze them in the moment when their actions irritated us and we keep them there like a prisoner…never seeing them grow, never seeing the changes they make in their lives, never allowing them to surprise us all because they are qualified as the annoying person.
Interesting how we are not qualified as the intolerant person.
If you spot it, you got it.
Anonymous
Oh, life. You do like to rub our noses in things until we finally catch the scent. These characteristics that drive us crazy, they are just a mirror that we are repeatedly forced to look into until we recognize the image looking back at us. That image is always us. It’s just so much easier to be annoyed by others since we are perfect. Or we don’t want to face some of the personal work we really have to do. Or we find it easier to not have to deal with the issue. Or we’ve acquired a taste for pointing our fingers at others.
But like a bad penny, the characteristics that annoy us in others are just going to keep showing up in our relationships and all of those we choose to have in our lives. These people and their annoying bag of tricks are here to teach us self acceptance. We will always learn more from those who irritate us most. They do seem to capture and hold our attention very effectively and illustrate the point so very succinctly, in a most visceral way.
So how do we love the us in them—without making a face, shooting them a side eye or verbally lashing out?
For more on this, you may want to take a look at My Little Fontanel .
Ahhhhhh memories…sorry to say, I’ve been there, done that and got the T-shirt. Unfortunately, there’s no working with some people.
Now if your problem is family…there is an extra factor to consider, distance. Family can be remarkably resistant to change, especially those who haven’t embraced all the varied facets of adulthood. We discovered that when all else fails, move away. That way, these types of folks can only crap on your party via long distance. It does wonders for improving your own mental health.
Makes me wonder though…how much of human migration was based on the fact people simply wanted to get away from their less than charming relatives.