I had been waiting twenty minutes when the waiter came over, apologetic, to tell me the dish I’d ordered was no longer available and would I choose again.
I should have been told at the time of ordering. We were hungry. And instead of simply picking something else, I took the opportunity to tell him it wasn’t good enough and that I expected better.
He couldn’t have been more apologetic. Eventually, with a shake of my head, I chose again and off he went. I sat there feeling perfectly justified for about four minutes.
What I Called It, and What It Was
This wasn’t unusual for me. Faced with what I took to be incompetence, I would be impatient, and I could rarely stop myself expressing it. I never felt good afterwards, and for years I filed it under arrogance. I’d been sharp with someone who was not in a position to answer back, in a way I would never have been sharp with a friend. Arrogance seemed the honest name for it. It took me years to notice the label didn’t fit.
Underneath the sharpness there was no sense of being better than anybody. There was something older and smaller than that. Some part of me didn’t experience the mistake as a mistake at all. It experienced it as evidence: that I wasn’t being attended to, and that I didn’t, in the end, matter very much. I took it personally in the most literal sense, as though the error had been aimed at me.
That isn’t arrogance. It’s almost the opposite. But it comes out of the mouth sounding exactly the same. I had the reaction. I felt the reaction. I regretted the reaction. And I still had the wrong name for it for years.
What Surprised Me Most
I’d assumed that examining this properly would make me think worse of myself. That’s precisely why I left it alone so long, and I suspect that expectation is what stops most people looking.
It did the reverse. What I found was not a woman who thought she was better than a waiter, but a much younger version of me who had concluded, on reasonable evidence at the time, that she didn’t count for very much, and who was still, decades later, quietly checking. That’s a sadder thing to know. It is also immeasurably kinder. You can’t be ashamed of a child for drawing a sensible conclusion from the information she had.
Self-awareness has a reputation for being an exercise in finding fault with yourself. In my experience it’s closer to the opposite. Almost every pattern I’ve looked at closely turned out to be less damning than the story I’d been telling myself about it.
The Person Who Showed Me
As I mentioned in The Road Ahead, my son does not do this. When things go wrong, he is on their side. He reassures people that it’s fine, that these things happen, and it costs him nothing. I’ve heard him on the phone with people I would have been short with inside a minute, seeing the best in them and helping them find a way through.
What amazed me was that he had no edge. No impulse to make someone else’s day harder because his own had been inconvenienced.
Watching him is what made my own behaviour visible to me. I had needed to see someone do it differently, right in front of me, before I could see myself at all. Left to myself, I’d have gone on believing I simply had high standards.
Three Kinds of Reaction
That restaurant isn’t typical of me. Most days I’m perfectly civil, and nobody would guess, which is the strange part. All of it had been running for decades without ever being examined, by me or by anyone who knew me well. How, when I was there the whole time?
Because reactions come in three grades, and only one is really available for inspection.
The ones that show. The sharp reply, the tone, the thing you’d take back. Other people tend to let you know about these, which makes them the easiest to spot, and for most of us the rarest.
The ones that leak. You say the right thing in the right way, and you’re churning underneath. People feel it, though nothing in the words gives you away. There’s nothing to point at, so nobody challenges you on it, and you can barely challenge yourself.
The ones nobody sees. The conversation replayed at two in the morning. The irritation swallowed so smoothly that even you barely registered it. The judgement about someone that you’d never say out loud. The flatness that arrives when something you had quietly hoped for falls through.
Most of our inner life sits in that third group, which means the reactions shaping most of our experience are exactly the ones nobody will ever mention to us. Which of the three is most familiar to you?
Where Yours Might Have Come From
Every family has its rules, and the unspoken ones are the most powerful. They do a real job at the time. The trouble is that nobody sends word when circumstances have moved on, and a child who learned early that she didn’t matter very much becomes a woman who hears a late order as a verdict.
You may recognise one of these:
- You can’t let a mistake go by without mentioning it.
- You go quiet rather than risk a disagreement.
- You say yes, and resent it afterwards.
- You hear a suggestion as criticism.
- You can’t accept help without feeling slightly diminished.
- A small setback arrives feeling like evidence of something much larger.
Any of those may once have been a sensible strategy that has outstayed its welcome. They are not personality flaws. They are intelligent adaptations that have outlived their usefulness.
Even in the most loving of homes, our experiences can shape our conclusions about ourselves. Our parents shout when we run towards the road. They only want us safe, but a child who cannot yet understand that concludes something simpler: that she is bad.
“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate”.
Carl Jung, Aion (Collected Works, Vol. 9ii, para. 126)
Not All of It Hurts
Some of your programming is worth keeping, and it would be easy to read this far and conclude otherwise.
I’m a solution finder. I rarely sit with a problem for long, which people around me sometimes find disconcerting. And that strength was installed by exactly the same programming that made me doubt I mattered at all. I learned to find solutions because I believed nobody else was going to.
The same goes for independence. My parents took very little interest in the details of my life, and one result was that almost nothing was imposed on me. My opinions were my own. It has led me down some poor paths, but they were mine to walk back.
Nobody sat you down and taught you your best qualities either. You learned them, then forgot you’d learned them, and now you call it your personality and quite rightly take the credit.
Learned Means It Can Be Looked At
What was learned can be looked at, and looking is enough to open a small gap between the trigger and the response. But you can’t see a programme clearly while you’re the one running it. So where, exactly, would you have to stand?
Try This
This week, notice one reaction that nobody else saw. Not the ones that showed. Those are easy, and they aren’t where most of your life is happening. Look for the one that stayed inside, and write down three things:
- What happened.
- What you felt, and how strongly.
- What you did on the outside instead.
Then leave it alone. Don’t analyse it, and don’t rush to name it. If my experience is anything to go by, the first label you reach for will be the harshest one available, and there’s a decent chance it’s wrong.
You are not looking for a fault. You’re looking for something interesting.
In the next article, we’ll look at how these patterns, together with what we believe and the words we use about ourselves, create our persona.
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Self-Awareness: The Gateway to Your Higher Self