We all know the feeling. Someone snaps at you, a colleague goes quiet, a look lands wrong, and your mind jumps straight to: what did I do wrong?
I spent years turning everything back on myself this way. A certain tone from someone, and I’d replay it for the rest of the day. A long silence, and I’d convince myself it was something I’d done. I’d come home from ordinary, unremarkable workdays feeling hurt and a little wrecked, having spent the whole evening overanalysing a conversation that probably hadn’t meant anything at all to the other person.
The Colleague Who Snapped
I learned this lesson properly once, the hard way, with a colleague from another department. We were collaborating on a project together, and she was short with me almost every time I asked her a question. Snappy, a bit cutting, nothing dramatic but enough that I started dreading our exchanges. After a few rounds of that, I stopped asking her things directly and switched to email instead, partly to protect myself from the tone, partly out of something closer to quiet resentment.
It made everything worse. She got moodier still. The project stalled, deadlines slipped, and the distance between us widened with every email that should have just been a quick conversation. Eventually my own patience ran out entirely, and I snapped back at her — what is your problem? — louder and sharper than I meant it.
She looked completely stunned, and then she walked out. I found her a few minutes later in the toilets, crying. It turned out her husband had left her for someone else, and he’d been cruel about it the whole way through, while she was still very much in love with him and trying to hold a full working life together underneath all of that.
I felt about as small as I’ve ever felt at work. None of her shortness had ever been about me. It had been about her entire life quietly falling apart while she still had to show up, answer emails, and collaborate on a project with someone she barely knew.
What I Took From That
I think about that moment a lot, mostly because of how confidently wrong I’d been the whole time. I’d built an entire story in my head — she doesn’t like me, she thinks I’m incompetent, I must have done something — and every part of that story was about me, when none of it actually was. The real explanation was something I couldn’t have guessed from the outside, and it had nothing to do with anything I’d said or done.
In most cases like that, probably the vast majority of them, the thing landing on you has very little to do with you at all. People are carrying their own lives underneath whatever tone or silence shows up on the surface — exhaustion, distraction, grief, things they’d never volunteer to a colleague over email. Their behaviour is a window into what they’re holding, not a verdict on who you are.
Shifting the Reflex
Since then, instead of spiralling the way I used to, I try to pause first. I remind myself of my own sphere of influence — what’s actually mine to manage here, and what almost certainly isn’t.
If I’m honest, this isn’t a skill I’ve mastered so much as one I’ve gotten somewhat better at reflecting on, more often than I used to, not every single time. The shift didn’t come from one moment alone. It built up slowly, through more examples like the one with my colleague, through reading more about what it actually means to give someone the benefit of the doubt, and mostly, I think, through age.
With age has come more evidence — more moments that had nothing to do with me but still managed to sting at the time, and more chances to look back afterward and see how wrong my first read usually was. These days, when the man jumping the queue at the grocery store gets under my skin for half a second, I try to remember he might have somewhere urgent to be that I know nothing about. When a friend hasn’t called in a while, instead of quietly keeping score, I’ll just send her a message myself, telling her I’ve been thinking of her — because waiting for her to reach out first assumes the silence is about me, when it’s far more likely she’s simply tired, busy, and hasn’t gotten around to it.
None of this happens automatically yet. The reflex to make things personal is still there, every time, and I still lose to it more often than I’d like to admit. But I catch it sooner than I used to, and that alone feels like real progress, even if it’s slower and messier than a tidy method would suggest.
A Kinder Way Forward
You can’t control how anyone else behaves, including the people having a genuinely terrible week underneath a tone you happen to catch the edge of. What you can control is the story you build around it, and whether that story automatically casts you as the reason.
This isn’t a case for ignoring poor behaviour or avoiding a real conversation when one’s actually needed. It’s a reminder that not everything circles back to you, and that staying inside your own sphere of influence usually serves you better than spending an evening rewriting a five-second interaction into a verdict on your character.
That reminder, on its own, turns out to be a quiet kind of freedom. I think about my old colleague sometimes, and I’m glad, in the end, that the conversation that finally happened between us was a real one, not the silent, snippy distance we’d both been adding to for weeks beforehand.