Skip navigation! Story from Living. Last Updated March 4, , PM. It was surface-level small talk : work, dating, who we knew there. After minutes of mutually tepid chat, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and when I came out, I was distracted by someone I knew waving me into the kitchen.
I never returned to the woman. I was in disbelief. Apparently the woman despised me with such an intense fervor, she still brought me up around people to disparage me, and had done so as recently as the week before. Our one and only interaction, to me, had been so short, so innocuous, that I found myself genuinely flummoxed.
At the same time I was alarmed to find out how much space I occupied in the mind of someone I had met for five minutes, five years ago, and had never thought about once again.
I suggested to another friend that maybe I should ask her to meet up with me to smooth things over. At its crux, the theory asserts that by worrying or stressing about situations, people or their actions β which we ultimately have little to no control over β it causes us unnecessary emotional and mental distress.
In fact, by allowing people to do what they will do anyway, you can see their true colors more quickly and then you can act accordingly. People writing mean things about you on the internet?
