Most of Your Problems With People Are Stories You Made Up
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You sent the text. They didn’t reply. You know exactly what it means. Except you don’t, and the story you invented is doing more damage than whatever they actually meant.
You sent a message to someone you care about. A friend, a colleague, a partner. Something that mattered to you. Maybe you put yourself out there a little. Maybe it was just a question that needed an answer. Either way, you hit send and then you waited.
They didn’t respond.
An hour passed. Then a few more. Then a day. And somewhere in that silence, you started writing. Not on paper. In your head. A story about what the silence meant.
They saw it and chose not to reply. They’re pulling away. They don’t value you the way you value them. They’re upset about something you did last week and this is the punishment. The thing you said at dinner crossed a line and now they’re creating distance. You know what this is. You’ve seen this before.
By the time they text back the next morning with “sorry, crazy day, what’s up?” you’ve lived inside a narrative for 18 hours that had nothing to do with what happened. What happened was their phone died, or their kid threw up, or they read your message while boarding a plane and forgot. The explanation was boring. Your story was a novel.
You didn’t experience the boring explanation for those 18 hours. You experienced the novel. Your body responded to the story you wrote, not to the thing that happened. The tightness in your chest, the confrontation you rehearsed in the shower. All of it was real, and all of it was based on fiction.
The Razor
There’s an old principle in philosophy called Hanlon’s Razor. The original version is blunt: never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity. The version that fits daily life is softer: never assume it was on purpose when it’s explained just as well by someone being busy, distracted, or having a bad day.
