When I’m upset, I’m usually pretty sure I know why.
She said that thing. He didn’t call. The meeting went badly. My child made a choice I don’t understand. Somebody disappointed me. I checked the bank account. I looked at someone else’s life for five minutes too long and somehow came away feeling worse about my own.
The reason seems obvious.
But I’ve had enough experience with myself by now to know that the thing I’m upset about and the thing that’s really hurting me are not always the same thing. A comment can hit me like a personal attack one day and barely register on another. Sometimes I’m furious about something embarrassingly small, only to realize later that I was already worried, tired, lonely, feeling unappreciated, or carrying something I never really dealt with.
What’s happening in front of me may need my attention. Someone may have said something hurtful. A problem may need to be handled. I’m not being asked to pretend otherwise. But what happened and the meaning I’ve given it are still two different things, and usually there’s more going on inside me than I first realized.
Maybe I’m not only upset because someone canceled dinner. Maybe it touched that old feeling of being easy to disappoint or easy to leave. Maybe I’m irritated because my husband forgot something I asked him to do, but underneath the irritation is something much more vulnerable: I don’t feel important to you right now. Maybe someone else getting the opportunity I wanted wakes up the fear that I’m running out of time.
And sometimes I’m not even upset with the person I think I’m upset with.
I can get disproportionately irritated with the cashier, the slow driver, or someone who asks one perfectly reasonable question at exactly the wrong moment. Meanwhile, I’ve been worrying all day, I skipped lunch, I’m trying to control five things I can’t control, and somewhere underneath all of it I’m scared.
But sure. The cashier.
The mind is impressively quick to find a defendant.
What I hear here isn’t, Your feelings aren’t real. It’s more like, You may not yet understand what they’re really about.
When I look underneath enough of my own upsets, the circumstances change but the fears are surprisingly familiar. I’m afraid I don’t matter. I’m afraid someone will leave. I’m afraid I’m failing. I’m afraid I’m losing control. I’m afraid life isn’t going the way I thought it was supposed to go.
New person, new situation, same bruise.
And this is where it gets practical for me. If I decide someone else is the entire reason I feel the way I do, then my peace starts depending on what they do next. I’ll feel better when he calls, when she apologizes, when I know the answer, when things finally turn out the way I want.
That’s a lot of my peace sitting out there in other people’s hands.
Of course I may still want someone to change their behavior. I may need an apology, an honest conversation, or a boundary. But I’m beginning to see that wanting something to change is different from deciding I cannot be okay until it does.
That difference matters.
So when something really hooks me—when I’m replaying it hours later, building my case in the shower, or feeling an emotional reaction that keeps getting bigger—I want to ask something other than Who caused this?
I want to ask:
Maybe criticism touched my fear of not being good enough. Maybe someone’s distance landed on an old fear of being forgotten. Maybe a change in plans exposed how much I rely on control to feel safe. Maybe another woman’s success found the part of me that still believes there isn’t enough to go around.
I don’t need to turn every bad mood into an archaeological dig. Sometimes I’m cranky and need lunch.
But when something has a real hold on me, there may be value in admitting that what happened five minutes ago might have touched something much older.
I may still be hurt. I may still need to deal with what happened. Nothing about looking inward means ignoring what’s in front of me.
It just means I stop asking the outside situation to explain everything happening inside me.
So today, instead of being quite so certain that I know exactly why I’m upset, maybe I leave a little room for another possibility.
Maybe I know what triggered me.
I’m just not sure yet that I know the whole reason.