"January!"

Three or four years ago, I was heading home on foot when a neighbour I’ve known ever since I was a little kid called for me. She’s this little old lady who loves to gossip about other people’s lives, so she’d usually watch the street for hours from an open window in her apartment. Anyway, as I stood by her window, she promptly said something along the lines of: «You’ve gained weight, haven’t you? I was here watching your belly bounce as you walk. You know, you should really try to lose all that weight while you’re still young. It becomes much harder as you grow up». I remember she went on and on for a few minutes, but I couldn’t really get past the “watching your belly bounce” part. That truly felt like a slap in the face. I knew I was fat, but I didn’t know I was so fat that people would feel comfortable making such rude remarks about it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with a good reply. I felt like being mean and alluding to past scandals in her family (just for the sake of humiliating her), but I decided against it. A simple question like: «Have you looked into the mirror recently?» would’ve worked, but that didn’t occur to me at that moment. Between being *****y and leaving it at that, I simply decided to leave it at that.

On a different occasion, also years ago, I was paying for some groceries at the store when a woman approached me, pointed out a finger to all the snacks (stuff like chips and Coke) I had lined up in the counter and started repeating, like in a mantra: «Junk, junk, junk and more junk food. All of this is unhealthy». Politely, I explained that I didn’t eat those things all the time, that it wasn’t all that unhealthy every once in a while and also something along the lines of delicious food being one of life’s small pleasures (LOL), but she said that I should never eat those snacks by any chance and proceeded to show off her own and very much healthy groceries. I didn’t feel like expanding what I knew would be a pointless discussion, so I just smiled condescendingly at her and her sweets-deprived little daughter, paid for my things and left. So what does she care about other people stuffing their faces with unhealthy food? It’s none of her business. She wouldn’t have bothered me if I was older and thin. It was really funny, though. I could tell she didn’t mean any harm.

It is hard to rework our emotional wirings.

I used to work with a woman who was nasty. It often took all of my might to do what I needed to do, politely, and get the heck away from her. It was very, VERY hard, but I had to act very uninterested in her mood swings. Even if under the surface I was boiling. I just remember driving home sometimes and thinking "Why on earth do I care what she thinks and does? She's just a misinformed, old, gossipy woman." I was often more angry at myself for having any sort of emotional reaction to things she did, even if I was able to hide it from her. Looking back on it, I'm happy with the way that I responded most of the time. But, boy was that draining... and I'm GLAD to be out of there. I guess at some point it's better to save one's sanity and avoid certain people, too... Strangers, well at least we don't ever have to see them again.

Faerie - it's so funny you should share that story because I am currently dealing with something similar.

My office is in an old building/warehouse/arts complex in my town. All of the tenants tend to be social and we often wander over to each other's offices for lunch or "office gossip" or something like that. All very friendly and chatty.

Earlier this year I'd become a lot closer to one of the women who works for one of the other businesses here. She and I are both dealing with some personal/emotional issues right now (some of which I've talked about in another thread here) and we had kind of bonded over our shared troubles. Except, I learned after a couple of months that she is the most NEGATIVE person I've ever met. She cannot see the bright side in anything. You ask her how she's doing and it's a huge sigh and rolled eyes and a litany of what's wrong. Even her "joking" and "teasing" is negative.

The problem is that because *I* have been dealing with a bunch of personal stuff, I allowed myself to be sucked into that "life is horrible" mindset. I found myself sharing woes with her, complaining about everything, taking every little comment someone else made to her as a personal affront, sharing negative gossip about other tenants and her employer (who is a friendly acquaintance), and so forth. Ultimately the negativity turned to depression for me - and I found myself sleeping more, feeling down and sad all the time, lacking motivation. I found myself dreading going to my office and actually avoiding my own work (which I love). I also found myself falling behind in my responsibilities because I was depressed.

It took me a while to realize that I had developed a very negative relationship with this woman and that I was allowing her an incredible amount of power over my emotions and feelings.

My first step had to be distancing myself from her, even though I knew she was hurt by it. After a few days to get my bearings back, I had to sit down with her and tell her that she and I could not continue this KIND of friendship. That I thought she was a really sweet person and I knew she was going through a lot of crap, just like I was ... but that the spiral down into negativity had to stop. That *I* personally couldn't deal with it any more. She took it very personally and hasn't spoken to me since.

I don't know if she will want to come back and be friendly or not, and I regret having to hurt her feelings, but I cannot let other people's emotions drag me down like that. I'm normally a very cheerful, upbeat, optimistic person and I didn't like the person I became around her.

So ... I guess aside from Faerie's story making me think of this situation, I wanted to share that even NOW, even though I am mostly pretty darned strong about not allowing others to influence my feelings and emotions, it happens. And I hate to hurt people's feelings, so I let it go on for longer than I should have because I knew she would be hurt - and because I knew I have to still see her in the building every day.

It's HARD not to allow people power over your emotions. Really, really hard.

.

Photo, you did what was right. You were as nice as you could be, but it had to be done. All you can do is wait and see what happens. Clearly you already know this, but you just *cannot* let people suck you down like that.