I was walking across Rome at midday in August.
The heat came off the pavement stones and burned my soles through my shoes. For real. I remember thinking quite seriously that I could not do another street.
By the time I got where I was going I was drenched, exhausted and thoroughly fed up. Not just uncomfortable. Properly grumpy, in that way where you would quite like someone to blame.
Then I sat down in the shade outside a cafe and looked around.
Same sun. Same stones giving the heat back up at everyone. And some people were strolling past, perfectly happy. A couple were laughing about something, and one man had even settled in with a book. Nobody else seemed to be having my afternoon.
It is a small thing to notice. It stayed with me anyway.
Because if the heat were doing it, we would all have been feeling the same thing. And we clearly weren’t.
I know where that goes next, and it is the uncomfortable part.
Why people trigger us so differently
If it is true of weather, is it true of people?
Put ten people in a room and say the same careless thing to all of them. One will be wounded for a week. Another will barely register it. Someone will find it funny, and someone else will quietly decide you are an idiot and think no more about it.
So what people say to us is not the cause of how we feel. Which means the question of why people trigger us has never really been about them.
I want to be careful here, because this is the point where people hear something I do not mean. I’m not saying nothing happened. People say and do things to us that hurt. That is real.
What I’m saying is narrower and more honest. The wound did not arrive from outside. It is already in us. It’s just that their words found it.
The first time I properly understood this I did not like it at all.
It felt like being told it was my fault. Like an insult on top of the injury.
It took me years to see that it is the opposite.
Think about what the other version actually offers you. If someone else put the feeling in you, then only they can take it out again. You are waiting for an apology that may never come, from a person who may not know they owe you one. You have no moves. You are standing there hoping the world will behave better next time.
But the moment the feeling is mine, I have something to work with. The next move is up to me. I can do something. That’s empowering. I have control over the situation. I am in the driver’s seat.
Staying with what you don’t want to feel
So what do you actually do when you feel hurt, triggered, angry, when you feel your wounds – when you feel anything you don’t want to feel?
Less than you would think, and it’s harder than it sounds: you stay with it.
You do not argue with it or explain it away, and you certainly do not rush to be spiritual about it. You let it be as big and as ugly as it is, and you keep it company.
Underneath the size of it, there’s usually something quite small and quite old. A childhood wound, perhaps, or something from an old relationship. A time you were shamed or laughed at or simply ignored. That is the part that was already there. That is what their words found.
When you own it the hurt fades. The wound can start to heal.
And eventually when there is only a scar where there was once a wound, something quite practical happens. The same remark comes round again, from the same person or a different one, and it does not catch. It might catch a tender part in you but not an open wound. You can let it go past.
You are not managing it, and you are not lying awake at three in the morning rehearsing a reply. You no longer need them to have said something else.
The best part is we cannot actually change other people – we don’t even have the right to. But we don’t need to. Because when we change, they change.
Because the old us had a particular shape, and their behaviour fitted it. When the shape goes, the fit goes. People either meet the new version or they drift, and both of those turn out to be all right.
I’m still hot walking in the middle of Rome. That has not changed. What’s changed is that I no longer think the sun is doing it to me.
Own your shadows. Own your life.
