New Moon Reflection
There is a certain kind of room that shrinks you without meaning to. Not through cruelty but through gravity. Someone in pain pulls you close, and because you are warm, you stay. Someone tells you their side of the story, and because you are fair, you listen. And slowly, without noticing, the room becomes the whole world. The feud becomes the news. The tension becomes the weather. I guess, we've all been in that room.
The tricky thing about being caught in someone else's drama is that it rarely announces itself as drama. It arrives dressed as friendship, as trust, as I'm only telling you this because I feel safe with you. And you do feel honored, briefly. Until you realize you've been handed something heavy that was never yours to carry.
The people at the center of it always believe they are being logical. That their read of the situation is the clearest. That they, uniquely, can see through the fog, when in fact, the fog is often coming from inside them. This isn't a flaw particular to difficult people. It's a human condition. We are all, at some point, the unreliable narrator of our own pain.
Here is what I've learned to ask myself when a room starts to shrink: who else is having a hard day today, and knows nothing about this? Not as guilt. Not a way to dismiss what's real. But as a compass. Somewhere, someone is sitting in a waiting room with bad news. Someone is counting whether they have enough to eat this week. A child somewhere is growing up without being chosen. Their hardship, indeed, doesn't cancel ours. But it does resize it. It returns us to proportion. This is not about comparison. It is about perspective as a practice, the quiet habit of lifting our eyes from the immediate circle and remembering that the circle is not the whole world.
The most honest thing I can say is this: I almost got pulled in. Not because I was foolish, but because I was open. And openness, without awareness, is just a door left unlocked.
At some point I realized that this is not my fight. Not because I didn't care, but because caring without boundaries is not kindness. It's just losing ourself in someone else's storm and calling it loyalty.
We are allowed to step back. To wish everyone well from a little further away. To leave the room and remember what the air feels like outside it. The world is huge. The room is small. And our attention, quietly, is one of the most precious things we own :)
Agree? Disagree? Have your own version of similar story? I want to hear it, write me here: postcardsfrombali18@gmail.com