Aug. 18 | On letting it pass.

This began as a diary entry, as just a few thoughts jotted down, until I realized after half a page that I was going to have a lot more to say than I'd planned on (and it became a great excuse to post here again, after over a year). Which tracks, maybe, since the whole subject turned out to be patience, and here I am three days later, apparently having needed every one of them just to arrive at the part where I actually start.

Some of what I have to say is about anger, which took its own while to work up to saying plainly. Being angry at a person, even in the cases where it’s more than fair for me to be, comes with a dread I've never been able to fully shake, and it took me longer than I'd like to admit to figure out that the dread has very little to do with how I’d be perceived. I assumed for a while it was some fear of coming off as petty, or unreasonable, or difficult—but no. I'd want my anger to be for something clearly explainable, something the other person could actually hear and understand and maybe even agree with once I said it, and I trust myself enough by now to believe I mostly only carry the kind that clears that bar. So it was never about the optics. It's the feeling itself I don't like—the plain, physical, unglamorous sensation of being disappointed in somebody, or frustrated with them, sitting there in my chest like a held breath.

Some of that, I think, is just how I'm built to process things. If something complicated is sitting in me, I need to talk it out loud to find out what it actually is, with the verbal admission ahead of time that whatever I say first almost certainly isn't where I'll land—it's a rough draft I say directly to another person, which is a wonderful way to work through most feelings and a fairly clumsy one to be angry with. The first thing you say when you're angry is rarely the true thing. Saying it out loud anyway, and getting it wrong in front of someone, just sucks. So more often than not, I skip past the discomfort as quickly as I can, by whatever door happens to be open. I'm sure that's cost me a few conversations I should have had properly, instead of considering them settled enough and going looking for something more pleasant to spend my energy on.

The upside of moving through anger fast is that I don't spend much time in it. The less flattering downside is a quiet, persistent sense that I upset people more than people upset me, which sounds like the setup to a complaint but is really just an uneven feeling I can't seem to shake. I doubt it's actually true so much as it's simply more visible to me. My own missteps take up residence and stay a while, whether or not they were real missteps or just me falling short of some impossibly polished version of myself that exists only in my own head. Other people's mistakes typically don't get the same treatment. There's a logic to why, even if it's not a particularly generous one: I'm patient, I don't like sitting in upset, so I don't sit in it for long—and other people, presumably, run on different clocks. That's not a sound piece of reasoning by any means, it's just the shape the feeling insists on taking, regardless of what I think about it.

It probably doesn't help that I'm conflict-avoidant to a degree that's almost comedic, with an unshy serving of social anxiety stirred in for flavor, and that at the very same time I'm warm and social and affectionate in a way that tends to draw in people built from the same cloth—the kind of friends who are also warm, also a little too invested, also fluent in the same emotional language I am. Which is lovely, and also a lot. Not because any one relationship is difficult, but because more people means more surface area, and more surface area means more small chances for something to catch wrong, and someone as allergic to conflict as I am ends up quietly absorbing far more of that friction than I ever let back out into the world. I think of myself as something like an introverted extrovert on my most normal days—plenty of people I love being around, not a whole lot of energy left over at the end of it to deeply process what any of it cost me.

Which leads to a question I genuinely don't have an answer for: do I want to let myself be a little more frustrated with people, on purpose, just to even things out a bit? Every time I get close to an answer, it slips sideways. I don't even know what that would look like in practice—whether it means actually saying the thing next time instead of tucking it in a drawer, or letting a silence sit a beat longer instead of rushing in to smooth it over—and there's a version of wanting this that falls apart the moment I look at it directly, because wanting the option to be angrier isn't really the same thing as wanting to be angrier, even if the two look identical from the outside. What I want, really, is just the option. Whether I'd ever use it is a different question, and one I'm content to leave sitting for now.

Grudges are where all of this either gets tested for real or quietly resolves itself, and I've come to think holding one has very little to do with how satisfying the anger feels in the moment. It's mostly just tedious. What really is there to gain from keeping someone's image permanently wired to the worst thing they ever did to you, replaying on a loop every time their name comes up? I don't think the alternative is forgiveness, exactly—that implies a decision I don't remember making. It feels closer to just letting the warmer parts of how I feel about people slowly blanket the colder ones, out of some instinct toward self-comfort rather than any deliberate act of letting someone off the hook.

I know this because I've lived it. The last real grudge I held was over something I had every right to be upset about—someone handled a situation badly, badly enough that for a good stretch I didn't want to talk to him or see him at all. For a while, I could barely hold him in my thoughts without an uncomfortable fire building in my chest, and there was a stretch where the idea of running into him by accident, or him spotting me first, was enough to sour an afternoon. It was akin to traumatic. It lasted so much longer than I wish it had. But it did fade, eventually, and—the part matters to me—I noticed it fading. There was a specific, almost pleasant moment where I realized I'd actually moved past it rather than just gotten tired of carrying it around. What was left, once the anger cleared out enough, was the plain and slightly anticlimactic fact that he's a good person who handled that one thing terribly. I messed up badly too, at the time—neither of us came out of it looking especially graceful. I think the real difference between a grudge and a memory isn't the event itself, but whatever still tightens in you when the event comes back to mind. A memory can sit there quietly. A grudge makes you flinch a little, every single time.

That's the umbrella over all of it, if I had to name one: patience as a kind of trust that the bad feeling will leave me on its own, by evening, by the next day, by the next week on the rarer occasions it takes that long, without me having to do the labor of forcing it out early. The small stuff already runs on this rule and I mostly don't notice—the frustrations that only sting for an hour rarely survive long enough to make it to dinner. That grudge just proved the same rule scales up, that it still holds even on a much longer, much heavier clock. A wrongdoing gently reverts back to just being a person again, once you stop holding your breath around them.

I got a smaller, dare I say sillier proof of this only last week, on a Monday morning in Siena, where I'm spending a few months for an internship. I woke a rude four hours before my 8:00 alarm and simply never went back under. I had a decent-sized project ahead of me that week—nothing dire, nothing that should have kept me up, just something I wanted proper time and a clear head for—and instead I lay there in the dark cataloguing everything at once. I should be asleep. I should be getting more sleep than this. Easily twenty minutes of hardly any movement, my eyes not even open, chasing a return to my slumber that never came. I doomscrolled in guilt for a while too, which never makes anything better—bad news about people I can't help can just become a stress carried for no productive reason, usually with nowhere useful to put it down. I wondered, briefly, if I was homesick. Not really—but I was ready to be home, ready for the small routines that only exist there, the ones you can't fake anywhere else no matter how nice the somewhere-else is. I even ran the practical gauntlet: if I would look like a mess today, if I would need the full shower-and-recovery routine or if could I get away with less. (I got lucky. My hair, against all odds, looked fine—a few passes with a brush and I was spared at least three quarters of an hour.) At some point, lying there fully awake and thoroughly overwhelmed by nothing in particular, I remember thinking, half amused at myself even in the moment: I only just woke up. Why is there already this much to think about?

It turned out to be almost insultingly simple. I just needed to eat. Once I let myself wait it out until the little café near work opened at 7:30, and got a coffee and a ciaccino—the Sienese focaccia, and hands-down my favorite alternative (probably my preference) to a warm ham and cheese sandwich—most of it lifted. Not because the food solved a single one of the actual things on my mind, but because it gave my brain somewhere else to sit for a few minutes, long enough to remember on its own that I'd be fine. It's the same mechanism as being hangry, more or less: the mood dissolves right along with the hunger, even though the sustenance was never really what the mood was about in the first place. And it's not as if everything I'd been turning over in my head actually resolved itself over a piece of flatbread. Plenty of it stayed with me the rest of that day, some of it the rest of the week, some of it probably until I'm home again for good. But I was, at least, in a state where I could hold all of it without feeling like I was about to lose my footing and go tumbling downhill, gathering speed on the way.

That, I think, is what patience with people actually asks of me, once all the higher-minded language around it is stripped away. Not that the frustration disappears on command, or that I magically get better at saying the hard thing the moment it happens, or that I stop quietly absorbing more of the friction than I let back out. Just that I trust the discomfort to run its course, on its own clock, without needing my help to get there.

And four in the morning, it turns out, rarely knows what it's talking about—which is a nice enough thing to remember, lying there in the dark with nowhere to be yet.