Read Between the Wrong Lines

I was annoyed by something and talking to my best friend when he asked me to elaborate, I realized it's going to be so bad, and I should pause. I apologised and told him I am a little messy today and I don't want to pass it on to you right now. I knew I was having a bad day, my brain was full, and if I kept talking, I was going to turn my annoyance into his problem. I gave myself a pass for being moody and pulled back before I said something stupid. Later, it hit me: I only did that because I knew what was going on inside my own head. But when the roles are reversed, we almost never give anyone else that kind of room to breathe, do we?

The funny thing about people we love is how fast our words change when we get hurt. We rarely say, "It was just a bad day, you made a mistake and that's okay." Instead, it is almost always: "How could you do this to ME?" That little phrase, 'to me', changes everything. The second you say 'to me', you make yourself the main character in a story, and the other person becomes the bad guy who failed their job. You completely brush aside the thought of what kind of day they had, what is going on in their head, or why they lost their cool. You are only thinking about what they did to your feelings.

I experienced this recently when I needed my best friend to show up for something that really mattered to me, and he consistently missed it 2-3 times. This time I completely lost my patience. I was furious. Naturally, my head immediately went straight into that to me victim narrative. How could my best friend do this to me? It took me a while to get over the anger, but looking back, I realized that in that moment, I could not see him as an individual human being at all. I was only looking at him through the narrow frame of his title as my best friend, holding him accountable to the imaginary but strict rulebook of what a best friend is supposed to do. In the middle of being hurt, it is nearly impossible to sit there, be sane, mature, and objectively ask what personal mess or distraction he might be going through.

There is another question commonly asked when we ignore the explicit 'to me' and just ask, "How could YOU do this?" Even then, the question is still tricky. The word YOU is almost never directed at the individual person standing in front of us. We are pointing directly at the title: the Best Friend, the Parent, the Child, the Sibling, the Partner. As if we are accusing the relation of failing its job description.

Think about what happens when a parent makes a mistake. Most of us are conditioned from childhood never to call out our parents, to treat their authority as absolute, and to suppress the unfairness just to keep the peace. So when your mom or dad loses their temper, projects their stress onto you, or says something deeply hurtful, it creates an intense internal conflict. You sit there feeling angry and hurt, thinking, How could my own parent do this to me? Here, the two separate questions are combined. The second you stop viewing them through the ideal lens of parent and start looking at them and their mistakes objectively, the entire picture changes. You stop seeing an 'always right' figure, and you start seeing an ordinary person in their 50s or 60s who is exhausted, dealing with health issues, and carrying decades of unexamined baggage (No, I am not justifying their point of view, either). Calling out a parent feels like a taboo because we are taught to respect the title. It does not excuse what they did, but stripping away the title allows you to see the real reason behind the mistake instead of just absorbing the damage, or taking all the blame on ourselves. The internet is full of ideal advice telling us how people are supposed to act. If a parent loved you, they would never say that. If a best friend was real, they would never do this. It sounds so good on paper, sometimes relatable in a short video, but it is totally useless in real life. Life happens in arguments when everyone is already exhausted, bad workdays, forgotten calls, texts, figuring things out, and sudden moments where someone just loses their temper. Yet, the second someone close to us makes a mistake, all that context disappears. We stop looking at the person in front of us and start reading between the wrong lines.

On the day I stopped myself from telling my best friend, I caught it just in time. But there have been plenty of days where I was not that aware like coming home feeling completely drained and snapping at my mother (oh, and justifying it by saying, but she is my safe space!). When we do things like that, we do not think of ourselves as terrible people or bad friends. We know we were tired, anxious, or just having a bad day. We desperately want people to understand our side, forgive us, and see that we just stumbled. We want to hear this question: "What's bothering you? Please elaborate," just like my best friend asked me. But when they get angry and say, "How could you do this to me?", it feels suffocating. You realize they are judging you purely by your title as a child or sibling, without giving you any room to be a human being who makes mistakes.

We spend so much time demanding (or expecting?) that the people we love stay up on the high pedestals where we put them. We want our parents to be wise, our friends to be endlessly available, understanding, and our family to always say the right thing. When someone you care about fails you next time, it might help to pause before reacting. Are you actually mad at the person standing in front of you, or are you just mad that the version of them you built in your head broke, or are you mad at the impact it all has on you? 

Maybe the kindest thing we can do for the people in our lives is to let them be human, even when it hurts and still choose them.