Topic: coping
Recently, during a visit with extended family, I discovered something I never knew about how I effect others. It's probably an issue you have encountered, with being in one role or the other.
It's not about road rage, but about the habit that a lot of us in the family have had. Including my father who passed it on to me, so he still "lives" in me even though he's been dead for almost a quarter of a century. It's something that makes my mother very upset, but she tends to mostly internalize this. So I'm just now learning how upset it makes her when I do something that's so habitual that I'd find very hard to break.
I'm talking about when I talk out loud to other drivers that I find annoying. Seldom do I raise my voice. In fact, I often mumble. Yet I'll "carry on a conversation"--OK, a monologue--with the old man whom my father and I (and my siblings) call "Egg Hauler." Or I may say: "OK, Lady, if you don't know where you are going, I can loan you a map."
My children, as they were growing up, used to find that amusing. It broke up the boredom of the trip sometimes, I suppose.
Somehow, talking to people who aren't able to hear me--and that might even be people who have been in the grave for so long, like my father--I find has a calming effect. I sort of remind myself that I cannot do anything about the person who is in their own world, with me stuck in mine.
I have frustration and a bit of humor tied together in one package. My mother and husband, on the other hand, think it's foolish and annoying. My mother tells me that it makes her upset and nervous--it's not fair to the other person because "They may have had a bad day, and you don't know it."
Of course, this is true. Yet I don't see that my frustration has anything in it that is going to communicate ill will to the other driver or change whatever is going on in their head. I accept this.
Having two feelings at the same time--in this case, frustration and amusement which can all be mixed with a third even (ie. compassion as I choose not to act in anger or obscene gesture, being in total control of my own actions)--works for me. Now that I know it annoys some people, I can be a little more aware that they are having a single feeling (ie. anxiety) and choose to work on how I voice my feelings when I'm with anxious people.
That would mean that I've added another new set of consciousness to the scene. And an acceptance that not everyone feels the same way I do. All without doing away with my awareness of the complexity of feelings about a rather simple scene.
Even as I remember that the same is true, and acceptable to me, for much more complex issues than the egg-hauler in front of me for just a moment.
