The thing you said at your angriest is the line people will quote back to you in five years.
REFLECTION
WHAT THIS MEANS
Anger produces the most quotable sentences and the least representative ones. People store them because they arrived with force, and force is what memory keeps, so a line you meant for ten minutes can outlast years of ordinary kindness. None of this is a reason to swallow what you feel. It is a reason to be careful with the sharpest available version of it.
At full temperature, delay the delivery rather than the feeling. Say you are too angry to talk well right now and come back later. What you say then will be truer anyway.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
Which sentence of yours would you take back if allowed?
MORE IN TRUTH, ACCOUNTABILITY & SELF-AWARENESS
- If you talk about someone more than you talk to them, you’re not solving a problem. You’re building a fan club for it.
- If you’d never say it across a lunch table, don’t say it in a comment box. Keyboards aren’t a costume.
- Big words are sometimes a fog machine. Good ideas usually survive being said in plain English.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.