I (30M) was at a party last night, I only knew the host, so I spent the evening mingling and dancing with people, so far so good. I asked if I could sit and join a group outside, and one of the girls said “That’s not your real accent, why are you putting that on?”, I asked what she meant and she said “you’re doing an accent”, I said this is just how I talk, and she laughed, so I said “Okay, I guess I’ll just go fuck myself then” and walked away. I should have just moved on but it put me in a foul mood for the rest of the night and I ended up going home early. How can I move past little things like this better?
5 comments
Dang you let her get to you. Ignore ignorant people. There’s no point engaging them.
I thought being less sensitive was the solution to problems in my social life too. I don’t think that now. First, I don’t think it is actually possible to be less sensitive without experiencing trauma, which of course is unwanted. Trauma unfortunately is inevitable. I think the solution whenever someone comes at you with negativity is to first assume that they are taking something out on you. This helps set your ego apart from the interaction. Make it a goal to pause and think whenever someone says something that hurts. Before allowing yourself responsibility for the negativity, assume the person from whom the negativity came is in pain, and pushing that pain outward. You just happen to be outward. Then once you have your emotions in check, you can decide what you want to do. Then you can act on your decision. It seems complicated to always remember all of that, but it’s about being a good friend to yourself and that is most important. After you are a friend to yourself, you can be a friend to the person in pain if you want to help them. An easy way to remember these steps is with OODA. If you haven’t heard of OODA, I would like to recommend reading about it. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Think through OODA whenever circumstances change. I’m sorry this encounter happened to you. Similar things have happened to me, and it made me uncomfortable to have my physicality questioned.
Yeah, you just need to learn to confront things immediately, like responding, “Seriously? You think I’m putting on an accent? What are you even talking about?”
I wish I had a good easy answer. From experience I know that being upset at myself for being “too” sensitive just makes things worse. It’s not something I can turn off and feeling like I need to stop being sensitive just makes me afraid of even doing anything. I feel like leaning into being a sensitive person and letting yourself experience those feelings is the way to go, it’s hard but better than the alternative of trying to push feelinga away and always be guarded.
She sounds ignorant/mean and I think your response to her actually wasn’t bad, just work on not letting it get you down for the rest of the night. Sometimes people just suck.