Do you hate conflict, too?

When I’m about to disagree with someone, or when someone disagrees with me, I panic.

I don’t quite know what to call it. Nervousness? Anxiety? Fear? Dread? All I know is that I feel it in my body. Something catches in my chest, and I feel cold in my arms and heart. My heart races faster. Everything seems suspended — my breath, my arms, my body. I freeze. Sometimes, the hairs on my neck will rise. Tears are quick to rise in my eyes.

Whatever it is, I decided along the way that it was the worst feeling in the world. I didn’t want to ever feel that way, and I certainly didn’t want to cry in front of other people. That would just “prove their point” and make me lose the argument.

So I optimized my life to avoid confrontation and disagreement.

Turns out, it wasn’t very sustainable. It seems that whatever you run away from, has a way of finding you.

A friend of mine — let’s call him Aaron — and I were having a conversation about serial killers in 2012. In 2012, I was a twenty-one year old Mona, fresh out of college, ready to tackle the world as an English major from Princeton University. This version of Mona was thoughtful, eager to be right, and unsure of herself. She wanted to prove herself in the world.

This argument began with a simple statement from Aaron:

“Serial killers are normal people, they are 99.999% created by the environment.”

I didn’t know that much about the topic. I felt shy chiming in with my point of view because I didn’t feel well-read enough, and didn’t think I could offer a substantiated opinion.

Still, 99.999% sounded like a very precise number to me, and therefore sounded incorrect. Last I had checked, the jury was still out on genetics versus environment, and the answer was somewhere in between.

I don’t like it when people are incorrect (especially on the Internet) or worse, careless or thoughtless. So I pressed him on what he was basing his conclusion on.

His response?

“There’s so much research on it. It’s like dots on a line and it all points towards the conclusion. It’s like gravity. You can’t prove gravity.”

I felt flustered. He sounded very confident, and I was getting less confident. Still, I thought I might have a point, and I wanted him to see it: “Listen, I don’t know about the exact number, but you realize that 99.999% is a lot of certainty for something. Are you saying that the research you have read is pointing to that conclusion, with some degree of uncertainty?”

“Everything is uncertain,” he said. “Higgs Boson. Lagrange. We scientists know that.”

I pressed him again. That doesn’t explain 99.999%, I said. His explanation?

“Consider y = x versus y = x + 1. That +1 doesn’t matter. But if it’s 3x? It does. Genetics is the 3x.”

As he explained, I was thinking ALL the bad thoughts about him. I’m Right, he’s Wrong, this is ridiculous, what the fuck, now you’ve MAPPED this to a mathematical model? You’re not even a scientist!

Then, before I knew it, I began to think all the bad thoughts about me:

Maybe I’m wrong, or not communicating properly, and ugh this feels awful, and I’m about to cry and it’s so frustrating because I don’t fully believe myself and maybe he’s right and I’m wrong, and ugh the moment I start crying, it ‘invalidates’ all the rational arguments I had…

“…and that’s why YOU’RE not a math major,” he said.

I burst out into tears, ran into the nearest bathroom, and spent an hour crying and fuming and being really angry at him for being pig-headed, and being really angry at me for not standing up for myself.

This happened another time at the gym with a trainer who corrected my squat and suggested that I do some quarter squats. This happened another time at work when a mentor told me that I should’ve known how to do something that I did once before, and happened to forget. This happened at a wedding where we accidentally got into an argument about politics, and I spent part of my friends’ lovely evening, in tears over how misunderstood and wronged I felt.

It was hard at the time, but breaking out into tears anytime I felt wronged was happening often enough for me to want a change. What I was doing — hiding my disagreements, my opinions, my feedback— wasn’t sustainable, and I knew it.

After many huddled bathroom tears, I hit a breaking point. I began to give myself permission to cry in front of people.

At first, it was horrifying. I tried to explain myself as I cried. People usually panicked.

Then, I began to find it amusing: finally, I get to argue my point rationally and calmly as they respond in panic. (All those years of feeling uncomfortable in the face of loud words? Here is a little discomfort in the face of loud feelings.)

Confronting confrontation is hard. I feel like I’m going to die every time, because for some reason, I’ve associated “loud words in opposition” as the worst thing that could ever happen to me.

It also gets easier every time.

The more I do it, the more I realize that it’s rare to be in direct opposition over anything. Someone might say to me, “It’s possible that environment plays a larger effect than genetics in mental health.” I might say, “The exact numbers are uncertain, and the mathematical model we might use is unclear.” Tomato, tomato. They’re both tomatoes.

The more I confront people, the more I realize that people never really mean harm in their words — or that if they do, they’re doing it to protect themselves. Maybe it made Aaron feel good to call me an English major, because he really wanted to be the expert on math and science. That’s okay. I was a fine English major, and my worth is based on more than just my major or my university. At Bra Theory, I have a lot of people on my team who are smarter than me who didn’t go to Princeton.

At the end of the day, I think confrontation is only scary because I held, and still hold, two beliefs:

1. I need to be right, and my feelings will be hurt if I’m not.
2. I don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings. Other people need to be right, just like me.

Now, I ask:

1. Can we both be right? What can we learn from each other?
2. Do I have to be right?
3. Are people really going to be hurt if I tell them my point of view, or can I give both myself and them the benefit of the doubt?

Nowadays, I think a little disagreement is usually all in good fun and learning.

Still, if we’re about to enter a disagreement, know that my immediate instinct is for the hairs on my neck to rise. I might burst out into tears on you.

And then, with effort, I’m going to explain — calmly and rationally and with love — why we are probably both right and seeing things from different angles. I will celebrate the opportunity to see the same problem from different perspectives. I hope you will, too.