Jacob and I recently bought a house and there was a lot of excitement, a lot of worry, a lot of happiness, a lot of sadness, and a lot of other overwhelming feelings. You may have heard about this? I feel like I could write several pieces about the emotional roller coaster that is buying your first house. Back to the story. Once we moved in, a few neighbors were kind enough to introduce themselves and even brought welcoming gifts. We truly did feel welcome in the neighborhood and we were so grateful for our good fortune. However, a couple months into living in our house and we’ve already found ourselves in a dispute with the neighbor right next door! How did this happen?! This is our very first house and within a couple months living here and there’s already an issue with a neighbor! The more I say it and the more I think about it, the more ridiculous it sounds. How are Earth did we live here long enough to get into a disagreement?
No matter how many times I speculate, it doesn’t change the facts. We and our neighbor are in a semi warm disagreement. I say semi warm because I wouldn’t escalate it to heated. We’ve mostly communicated through email and it has not been a pleasant back and forth. There’s been some passive aggression, something I have a lot of issues handling, as well as accusations. We’re not at each other’s throats, but it seems like we’re both avoiding each other at all costs. Unfortunately,It’s a dispute where there is no room for compromise. Either it’s one way or the other. It’s a situation I didn’t think I’d find myself in. For those of you who have found yourself in a situation like this, what did you do? Did you find a way to mediate?
I’m sure some of you with social anxiety and some of you without will be able to relate to me here. I have been dwelling on this nonstop. I find myself stressing out because I don’t want our neighbor to think poorly of us, but I don’t have control over that. Our neighbor made her opinion clear on how she feels about us, and it’s not good. I’m saddened because the interactions we’ve had up until now has been positive, but once this dispute started, our neighbor focused solely on what we disagreed on. It was as if all our other good qualities that she had learned about completely dissipated. I struggle to understand this even now and I struggle with the fact that I can’t make her see that just because we disagree about this one thing does not mean we’re bad people.
Emotional Prowess with a Neighbor Dispute
So how have I handled this? Being dramatic and exclaiming that my mental wellness is compromised? No? Okay, then. Well, first I’ve tried to distract myself, but thoughts of the situation kept popping up in my head. I had these daydreams where my neighbor comes up to me and is essentially a horrible person who yells at me and insults me over this disagreement while I stand on my high horse and say “I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do” and shut it down like some social wizard. Sometimes my daydreams are a little different and when my neighbor confronts me and she insults me and she yells at me, I insult and yell right back. First, I should say none of this ever happened. She certainly insulted us, but not in a “You guys are buttheads” kind of way. Anyways, I want these daydreams to happen and at the same time I want the situation to just go away. I wonder if these daydreams are helping me to express my emotions or if they’re encouraging me to dwell on the situation. I still haven’t quite figured that one out, but I’m leaning toward thinking they contribute to my dwelling. However, I’ve always been something of a dreamer and daydreaming is one of my favorite things to do so I’m not all surprised that this dispute wound up in my daydreams.
I also talked to friends and family about it. No surprise here, but everyone I spoke to was on my side. Of course they were on my side; they’re my friends and family. No matter how hard I try to tell the story with all the facts, it’s most likely biased because I’m the one telling it. It made me wonder if my friends and family heard her side if they would side with her. This is just an interesting thought to me. Perception really does mean everything when it comes to telling stories.
Anyway, I find that having friends and family agree with me really does help me to not dwell on it. When it comes to a disagreement, I almost always have a feeling of doubt, if not several. I’d love to say that I’m so confident and so set in my convictions. That if I believe I’m right, it’s black and white to me and everything is set in stone. I’m not like that. I see in so many colors and tones. I do believe strongly in my convictions, but that doesn’t mean I’m tied to them. I think this can be a good or a bad thing. In this particular instance, having friends and family tell me that they would do the same thing in my shoes definitely affirmed that my decision didn’t make me a terrible person. When you have someone calling your character into question and implying that you’re somehow a crappy person, whether or not you believe them, it’s always great to hear other people telling you that you’re not. I know that I’m a good person regardless of what my neighbor thinks, but having friends and family confirm this just makes me feel a little lighter.
Lesson Learned Thanks to This Neighborly Disagreement
Because of this situation I learned something about myself. I’m already a little worried when it comes to people because I don’t always understand how they communicate and everyone seems to have expectations. This is where my social anxiety gets me because expectations freak me out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally included in this. I absolutely have expectations of other people. For example, I expect that I can walk down the street without getting spit on. But if I get mad about being spit on, maybe the person doing the spitting would be equally confused as to why I had this expectation because they get spit on all the time. This didn’t happen to me, but this is just an example of an expectation. I’m hoping it didn’t happen to any of you too and if it did, please tell me the story because I’m very interested.
Anywhooos, I have my guard up around people I don’t know well because I don’t know what they expect of me and I’m not good at handling disappointment, especially when I feel like it’s unwarranted. When I meet someone and spend time with them I, like so many others, start making judgments about that person. Some are positive, some are negative, some may just be neutral. When I have a negative judgment about someone I don’t know very well, I tell myself I shouldn’t have that feeling. I tell myself I’m being negative and I shouldn’t feel that way. The problem is I firmly believe we have intuition that we should be aware of when it comes to meeting a person. Sometimes I think my intuition is telling me something I should know about someone and I don’t listen to it because I don’t want to be negative. I don’t want to judge someone when I don’t know anything about them.
I’m going to use my neighbor as an example here. I tried thinking of hypothetical examples but for some reason I couldn’t quite write exactly what I wanted to. So let’s just use my neighbor. When I had a couple conversations with her I couldn’t shake the feeling that she didn’t seem exactly genuine. For some reason I never felt truly comfortable around her and I wasn’t really sure why. She was perfectly nice, she was kind, and yet, I never felt comfortable. I told myself it was just my social anxiety and I told myself that I’m just negative about people and I need to let that go. However, after this dispute, I’m starting to see my previous judgments and feelings in a different light. I think my intuition was picking up on something when I was around her. There were warning signs and I ignored them. I’m not saying this trying to condone snap judgments of people. But I am now keenly aware of the difference between conscious judgments and subconscious judgments. I’m trying my best now to pay attention to what my intuition tells me about people. When a person says someone is a good judge of character I believe they’re saying that this person has great instincts to pick out good people. I think I have this capability and I just squandered it because I told myself that I was just being negative. So for now, I’m going to try to listen to my intuition and try to decipher the difference between my intuition and my own plain judgments. Do you feel like you’re a good judge of character or do you feel doubt anytime you make instinctive judgments about a person?
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