That Woman
Lessons from toxic people
I was once at a swimming pool watching my kids playing in a toddler’s pool.
I had a headache; I was in a bad mood and tired after a day in the office. I was surrounded by annoyingly noisy kids and chatting parents everywhere. The smell of chlorine was overwhelming. I was grumpy and annoyed. What a waste of my precious time.
I was miserable. Then I saw That Woman.
I have to say that back then (and it was some years ago) most people in my world fell into three categories:
- Plain Stupid
- Annoyingly Toxic
- Totally Fake.
If I couldn’t immediately place a person into either of the first two categories, I put them in the Totally Fake category because they were obviously good at pretending. Exactly like I was at the time.
That Woman
As I sat on a wooden bench suffering from all the noise and the chlorine smell, a woman was approaching me and trying to make eye contact.
I didn’t know the woman, but I knew exactly what she wanted. She randomly picked me from the crowd for a friendly chat. A theme of my life. People often mistook my calm and nice demeanor thinking they were dealing with a soft, understanding and caring individual. How ridiculous.
My mind quickly put a label on the woman: Plain Stupid plus Annoyingly Toxic.
As always, my mind was right. Of course, if it wasn’t for my overwhelming headache and exhaustion, I’d have faked ‘the nice guy’ as I usually did. I’d have pretended to be a nice sociable person enjoying a small chat. But not that evening.
The Woman sat next to me and started talking.
She didn’t seem to be from a well-educated background, she was simple-minded, and her thoughts jumped from one place to another. Her chatter was difficult to follow. She struggled with putting sentences together.
I put on my icy cold poker face which I brought from Russia (women, especially young women, often put the coldest and stoniest face on there to fend off unwanted attention from male strangers who used to be quite aggressive, at least back in my days).
The icy cold face trick didn’t work; the Woman didn’t notice it which worked as a legitimate confirmation for my mind that the label Plain Stupid was exactly the right one.
The Woman was so keen to tell me about her life including the detail that I didn’t need to know and didn’t care about. And she didn’t stop to listen.
I thought, ‘Oh dear. I won’t be able to fake it this time’.
Panic
I could feel irritation arising in my stomach. I panicked.
I knew from experience that the irritation would grow into cold anger that would feel heavy and icy cold and would slowly start rising up to my chest. Once the cold anger was in my chest, I’d nearly lose control. If I acted on my anger, I’d come across as rude, inconsiderate and arrogant — at best. If I suppressed the cold anger, I’d feel resentful and annoyed for days, and most likely would take it out on my partner.
As panic kicked in, I tried to remember the goal of my lifetime self-discovery journey: wasn’t I supposed to learn to shape my mindset and emotional reactions instead of blindly acting on them?
I didn’t have long to reflect on that. I knew that once the cold anger crystallizes in my chest, I would completely disregard my self-discovery journey, all the meditation techniques that I had learned and my aristocratic grandmother’s lessons on good manners.
So, I put aside my loud thoughts about how Plain Stupid and Annoyingly Toxic That Woman was. Not that I could completely stop my thoughts; they were going round in circles like a broken record. But I put my mind aside, I disregarded the irritation growing in my chest and allowed myself to just be there in the moment without any feelings.
Transformation
I watched That Woman talking.
I was watching her face, feeling her mood and looking into her eyes. I was mostly listening to her voice and not to what she had to say, because I couldn’t relate to her experience anyway and she didn’t seem to care if I was listening.
I think the Woman was trying to tell me — in clumsy sentences — that she was trying hard to make the right choices in life. She was learning to discern good from bad. I nodded, smiled and said ‘oh, really?’ just to pretend I heard what she was saying.
I was watching her and tuning into the Woman’s essence.
Slowly, my own thoughts and the Woman’s voice became quieter and merged with the background noise of the kids screaming in the pool. I just sat there feeling the Woman’s presence. It was a very strange feeling. Her presence felt like an inquisitive joyful child-like human being. It was a very lightweight presence, like sunshine but not as bright.
The more I was tuning into her presence the more the Woman’s voice sounded to me like the murmur of a stream — calming and soothing. What she said didn’t matter, but her energy mattered.
Then I suddenly realized I became very relaxed. My headache was completely gone, I felt refreshed and balanced.
The Lessons
That Woman probably spent 20 minutes with me and then moved to the next stranger to tell them about her life. Soon after that, I called my kids from the pool, and we left.
Some days after my encounter with That Woman, I was thinking about the lessons I learned.
- Words don’t matter. If we truly tune into another person, we will sense who they really are behind all the exteriors — just another human being coping with life, exactly like I do.
- Judging people simply doesn’t help. Negative mental biases create a whirlwind of negative emotions. And all this negativity resides in me. Who wins then?
- My attitude is my responsibility. I can’t change the person, but I can always change my attitude.
‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. ‘ — William Shakespeare
