I used to have many, many passive-aggressive traits.
Most of the time I felt wronged, mistreated, unappreciated and unseen.
Of course I constantly collected ‘data’ to confirm this (which was quite easy) and build my cases, and once every couple of months the shit hit the fan, and I totally lost it.
Completely out of nowhere, mostly.
Now I’m very happy to say that a lot of that shit has gone overboard in the last couple of years, but there’s still some of it left.
So let me share one of my fucked up, older habits.
To start, it’s helpful to know that I’m an absolute sucker for punctuality and keeping my promises.
If I tell you I’ll come back to you about something, tomorrow at 12.15, I will let you know, tomorrow, at 12.15.
Or 12.14.
I’m always early for appointments.
I’d rather wait for a bit than let people wait.
I like the idea of letting others know and feel they matter enough, by respecting their time and honoring our agreements.
Many people are not like that, at all.
Many people are incredibly preoccupied and they don’t really care too much about their promises, and when they do, it’s not nearly as important as it is for me.
When they tell you they’ll let you know tomorrow, their tomorrow could just as well be next week or the week after that.
And what I’ve seen is that those tomorrows very often turn into nevers.
People forget stuff, easily.
Maybe they don’t want to and don’t intend to, but they do, because life goes on and new important things arise all the time and promises easily fade away.
It’s not even personal, really, just sloppy and nonchalant, or simply a case of shifting priorities.
Now for my particular passive-aggressive notion around this.
When a person makes a promise about responding to an offer (for example) and tells me they’ll DEFINITELY let me know by the end of the next day, I expect them to let me know by the end of the next day.
That’s not rocket science for me.
But it happens very often that I don’t hear anything the next day.
And that’s where my rocket of agony and frustration gets created.
If I don’t hear from them at or a little over the time they told me they’d respond, AND they also don’t inform me that they need more time (which changes everything and diffuses the situation), I automatically start blaming them for that.
Then the next day comes, and now this weird other mechanism kicks in, like clockwork.
Because now there’s this experience where I sort of hope they also won’t respond the next day, so their ‘crime against me’ gets even bigger, and I can blame them even more.
I already feel hurt that they didn’t keep up with the initial agreement, and now I want that to be even worse, so I can feel even more wronged and disrespected.
This is, I guess, pure victim mentality, or at least something that comes close, and it feels like I want to dwell in the fact that they have fully ignored me.
So I’m probably not important enough (or some other deep notion that every single person on the planet suffers from), and they don’t give a shit.
The days go by, and my sense of anger and frustration grows, and I long for the moment when I can confront them with their utter ignorance.
I even start writing emails in my head.
Long ones.
And then, after 4 or 5 or 6 days, it all starts to come down.
The urge to be wickedly angry and let them know about it, to be passionately right and deeply disappointed, and let them feel guilty about it, becomes smaller and smaller.
After a week there’s nothing left, and the tendency to milk this totally unfair and messed up situation has completely gone.
I’m left with nothing.
No answer or response from them, but also no twisted sense of satisfaction for being ignored and feeling unseen.
The Arch of Righteousness has dissolved.
And the explosives that used to grow inside of me, are gently detonated before they can do any damage.
What’s so amazing about this, I guess, is that it shows how deeply people can change, and that default habits can either diminish or disappear.
Life is much better without this Blaming Game.
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(Photo by @devasangbam, for Unsplash)