It’s hard to be a person.

We spend our lives trapped inside one body, watching the world through the same set of binoculars, from the same perspective, parsing information through the same channels and filters.

We turn the same thoughts over, flipping and rotating them, believing what they say, often when we shouldn’t. And while we regularly try to change people’s minds, argue with their opinions, takes and points of view, so rarely do we take on our own.

Considering the circumstances we find ourselves in (one body, one mind, one life), it’s no wonder we take most things personally. Yet, the truth is that most things aren’t about us at all.

To illustrate this point, I want to share something that happened to me in the 1990s, when I was in my 20s.

Let’s go back in time.

INT. East Village Studio Apartment. Day.

I’m having a perfectly fine afternoon for a person who doesn’t have many perfectly fine afternoons during this period of life. I’ve been making cut-out poetry, gluing words and lines of my own poems onto black-and-white Xeroxes of photographs I’ve taken of my friends’ faces.

Words are scattered all around me. My fingertips are tacky and gray from cheap glue and Xerox toner.

My phone rings. It’s a landline, connected to a wall, useful for making and receiving phone calls. You cannot put it in your pocket.

I want to wash my hands, but I also want to answer the phone. I pick it up,

“Hello?” I say.

“Hey,” a man says.

“Hey back,” I say, assuming he’ll say who it is, or I’ll place his voice in a minute.

“What are you up to?”

“Just making poems,” I say.

“I didn’t know you wrote poems,” he says.

I pause.

“That’s odd,” I say.

At this point in my life, I consider myself a poet. My poems keep getting published, and I keep writing them. I haven’t written anything else, not even a short story. Everyone in my orbit knows I want to be a poet; that I long to make a living this way (🤣)

“So listen, I was hoping we could talk for a minute?”

“Sure,” I say, cradling the phone between my ear and shoulder while trying to peel the glue off my fingers. I’m hoping in the following minute, I’ll be able to figure out who I’m talking to. It feels too late to ask now, plus it’s clear I should already know—he knows who I am, after all.

Also, I don’t want to hurt his feelings, which is something I actively avoid doing at this time in life and the next couple decades because I get panic attacks just worrying someone might be upset with me.

“I really like you,” he says, “and I’ve been having a great time hanging out, but this just isn’t working for me anymore.”

Despite not knowing who this person is, as well as already having a boyfriend, this sentence does what it’s meant to—my stomach drops. Break-up dread splashes about in my belly. I feel dislocated, surreal, and thrown off balance.

Reader, I feel hurt.

Also, I now know exactly who he is.

A stranger.

Instead of taking that moment to tell him that he dialed the wrong number, I get caught up, or carried away, or I am suddenly actively mad on behalf of the person he means to be breaking up with, and I decide to go to the mat for her.

“Wait. You’re breaking up with me?” I say.

“It’s not you,” he said. “It’s me.”

I roll my eyes.

“I’m just not feeling it,” he says.

“Did you ever feel it?” I ask.

Silence.

My hurt feelings gain density and form in that silence.

“So you led me on?”

“I didn’t mean to lead you on. That wasn’t my intention. I just … things changed. Something changed.”

“What changed?”

“I can’t really explain it.”

“Well, try …”

“I just don’t think we’re compatible.”

“In which ways?” I ask.

Silence. This second silence stings more than the first.

“Well, I like being out and you like being in. I like adventure and you don’t. Things like that…”

“You’re making good points, and I agree. We should break up.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yes. I would never want to date someone who doesn’t recognize the person he’s breaking up with is not his girlfriend, but a wrong number.”

Silence.

“Dina?”

“Nope. Amanda.”

“Dude, I’m so sorry.”

“You’re sorry? I just got broken up with!”*

After we hung up, I sat at my desk, slightly shook and dispirited. I looked down at my art poems and suddenly I saw my life through this stranger's eyes.

Of course he broke up with me—I'm an idiot who thinks she's going to make money as a poet! Who would want to date someone so unserious?

I felt embarrassed for myself. So much so, I had to leave the scene of the crime.

I left my apartment and walked around my neighborhood. I was now in a bad mood, hurt and feeling rejected, having taken personally a rejection meant for someone else.

I met up with some friends at Bar 81, told them a stranger broke up with me, and we laughed about it, but I felt genuinely, weirdly hurt and practically blindsided.

(Fast Forward to the present.)

INT. DAY. THE HOW TO LIVE NEWSLETTER

At the time I couldn't make much sense of my hurt, but in the years since, I often think about that story because it reminds me of something vital: We take so much personally that has nothing to do with us.

I knew he had the wrong person; that it wasn’t me he was breaking up with, but it hurt anyway, because rejection lands in the body first.

We are hurt when we see social media posts of friends hanging out together without us. We are hurt when we get a last-minute invitation to a party that had clearly been months in the planning. The hurt is real, and it comes on fast. But what we do next is where we go wrong: We build a story on top of our emotion, and that story is person. We’re too much, too little, forgettable, unserious.

That’s what I did, and where most of us go sideways.

I took something that LITERALLY had nothing to do with me, and made it mean something about me. I knew being a poet was unrealistic. I knew I wouldn’t make a living doing it, and that insisting I could was unserious. But I wasn’t ready to admit it. What I was ready for was to turn that worry and fear into the reason someone might reject me.

We think things are personal because we personalize them.

We build stories on top of our hurt to fill in the gaps, to make sense of what we don’t understand. And to make it more understandable, we assume judgements about ourselves on other people's behalf. Those judgements are wrong. We’ve made them up.

And we have control over this.

Everyone is, like we are, in their own narrow bubble of worries and concerns. Each of us was raised in a certain family system with specific beliefs that gave rise to a world view that everything gets filtered through. When someone doesn’t include us, hire us, or overlooks us, we can't see the invisible mechanisms running their decisions. We can't see their projections, their compensations, their own internal logic pretzeling into a mold based on their personal history.

Even when someone doesn’t like us, not one bit at all, it’s not about us. Other people can only respond to their internal realities, and all their experiences are filtered through one limited lens. Their experience of us is not who we are.

Even when someone hurts us on purpose; it starts in them. That person is already hurting, and lashing out is their misdirected effort to relieve their pain. We get to decide whether someone else’s pain becomes a part of how we see ourselves.

So the next time a stranger calls and breaks up with you, the next time someone gives you a last-minute invite or doesn't return your wave, let it sting. Then notice the story you start telling, and realize it’s fiction. Then tell a different story. One that goes like this: “There are a thousand reasons for what just happened and I’m not going to spend hours of my time guessing.”

One day a stranger broke up with me, and it hurt my feelings. That part was out of my hands. But then, I spent the rest of the afternoon wallowing in a story I built myself, out of a fear I already had.

I made it personal when it wasn’t.

Until next week I remain...

*I don't recall the EXACT conversation, so I've reconstructed it based on memory. What's most vital is that a stranger broke up with me on the phone.