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Your Insult Is the Only Thing I Remember
I keep forgetting the positive and accentuating the negative.
If it’s happened once, it’s happened about a thousand times a day. (OK, that’s an exaggeration — but it happens too often.) Someone says something unflattering to me, and it gets me thinking way more than it probably should.
I’m impressionable like that, especially when it comes to accentuating the negative. This isn’t to say I’m not appreciative whenever someone is kind and generous enough to compliment me. It’s just that the occasional not-so-positive reviews are the ones that always seem to affect me most.
Hurl an insult my way, and I might spend the next 24 hours dwelling on it, wondering if I’m really that bad. Usually I know I’m not, but could I be mistaken?
What if other people are slamming me in their thoughts while smiling to my face? When will the next text message or email arrive unexpectedly from someone with one complaint — or a litany of them — against me?
I sweat the small stuff and dwell on it forever, maybe not more than most, but to a nonetheless borderline-unhealthy extreme. Although I’ve never thought of myself as being especially insecure, when the mask of self-confidence falls off, it lands with a thud.
