Personal Chemistry

A Litmus Test

There are people with whom you have little in common but get along fantastically well and people with whom you share much in common but would rather lick battery acid than even have to think about.

People for whom an unreturned phone call is totally NBD, and others, for whom it is a smug manipulative power play of assholian magnitude and a very BFD.

Some people are deadly toxic to our emotional wellbeing.

Others nourish and feed our spirit.

Figuring out who translates into personal poison is pretty basic. What’s NOT so simple, is understanding why.

The prerequisite for finding the answer is a rather big stumbling block, at least for me. In order to get to why, you must first acknowledge that it has absolutely nothing to do with the person in question.

What? Nothing to do with them at all?!?

No. Nothing.

They are merely the messenger.

It has EVERYTHING to do with the emotion it triggers.

First, what exactly is the emotion? Disgust, abandonment, disappointment, disconnection, unpredictability, conditional love?

So many fun options.

And then, when and with whom did you feel it last?

And before that and before that? Inside THAT, is the message. The reason it has such a strong charge is because of the chemical reaction it creates in combination with our personal history.

For someone else, that same behavior would be completely innocuous. NBD.

But NOT for you.

By the time you track it down like a modern-day therapeutic huntress, the intense charge surrounding the person in question has dissipated, often completely evaporated.

It’s kind of freaky actually that something that feels SO big can undergo such radical transformation with a little intimate investigation.

It is a HUGE relief.

Because now they no longer have control over how you feel. You do.

We are each like idiosyncratic litmus paper, each comprised of a very individual mixture of personal experiences.

These experiences turn us into walking pH indicators that react differently depending on who touches us and how.

Thank the messenger and dismiss them.

The message is what matters