Someone’s annoying habit might be how they survived something you’ll never know about.

Behavior that grates on you often started as a solution. The friend who checks the lock twice, the one who talks through every silence: those habits got built in rooms you were not in. Knowing that does not make them pleasant. It makes them human.

Pick one person whose quirk gets under your skin and guess, privately, what it might have protected them from. You will probably guess wrong. Guessing at all tends to soften the edge in your voice.