Blowing our cover
I have this fantasy where Pema Chodron and I go hangout for an afternoon at Peet’s. She is wearing her brown and gold and saffron Tibetan Buddhist robes, and perhaps she’s having jasmine tea while I’m sipping my small single-shot soy latte with no foam, and we’re just chatting about life. Then she says something that just gets straight to the core of everything, such as “The people who irritate us inevitably blow our cover,” and I reach up to high-five her across the table and say, “Pema! Good god! Yes. YES! That is so. right. on!”
This is not unlike how I respond when a friend says something that excites me in real life (it has been observed that I have some, um, exuberant tendencies), but of course, the weirdness is in imagining high-fives with a famous Tibetan Buddhist priest….at Peet’s.
I don’t want salves. I don’t want pithy mantras. I don’t want the thing that makes it okay in the moment.
I want truth. I crave truth. I’m hungry for truth. I don’t even care how ugly it looks–there is something inherently beautiful about looking straight at the ugliness of an unwanted thought. Transparency is terrifying, and at the same time staggeringly beautiful; a relief.
Yes. Someone just told the truth. Yes. Thank you.
The Truth About the People Who Irritate Us
The truth is that I’m a Life Coach, and I support others in radical transformation. I hold space for my clients like a fucking rockstar; I’m high on life after each session. I’m not afraid of bearing witness to pain; I’m also an enthusiastic supporter of full-on lived-out-loud joy. That’s all true.
That said, there’s another parallel track of truth running alongside that train: people who irritate me blow my cover. I can go into “don’t wanna” mode with the people who irritate me: I don’t wanna hold space for them. I don’t wanna have compassion for them. I don’t wanna support them.
In other words, the people who irritate me blow the “cover” of me being this supportive person who will be with other people even amid difficulty. The people who irritate me expose my limits, the places where I don’t have it all together.
I imagine that some version of that is true for you as well.
Irritated? Pain.
Intellectually, of course, we want to hold space and be compassionate and be supportive people at all times, no matter what life throws our way. But when we’re feeling irritated or frustrated? We’re in pain.
It’s hard to want to do something—like be compassionate or understanding—for someone who is playing a part in our experience of pain.
So, that becomes the difficulty. The people who don’t irritate me get the full on panoply of my support and enthusiasm. The people who do irritate me see me acting closed off, guard-up, judgmental. I can only imagine what some family members and former friends think when they see this website, talking about love and compassion and integrity and courage when their experience of me has been anything but. I share that in the interests of transparency.
The people who irritate us blow our cover.
And? This is good.
The Choice
This is good? Yes.
It is an opportunity to see where a Story of fear is getting in my way.
In those moments when we shut down and close off around those people who we find harder to get along with, we are operating from a Story of fear. Sometimes the Story of fear is that we can’t let our guard down and that’s why we’re guarded. Other times the Story of fear is that we should hit first, hoping to avoid being hit later.
The Story doesn’t matter so much. What matters is noticing that we’re operating from our fear in those moments, and that this response to irritation does not actually do anything helpful. It does not even make us feel good.
So basically, anytime someone irritates us, this is an opportunity–the jig is up. All of our hideouts are exposed. We are confronted with pain (in the form of irritation with someone), and now we gotta deal with it.
If you are like me, at first you sigh and think, “Shit.”
If you are like me, you also want something bigger and bolder than a life lived by default fear responses.
They’re Doing It, Too
That person irritating you? They’re probably irritated by you, too.
That’s a humbling thought. It’s not “They’re bad, and I’m good.” It’s, “We’re both chafing against one another, depending on our Story about this experience.”
Again, there’s an opportunity: the opportunity to stop seeing them as bad and ourselves as good (because that doesn’t get us anywhere). There’s another opportunity: to step into what creates peace or harmony instead of prolonging the conflict.
Who’s going to stop the cycle? Why not you?
It is masochism to keep replaying the old song of how bad that person is and why they irritate us and how we’re so right while they’re so clueless and wrong. If you keep playing that old song with someone in your life? They are blowing your cover.
They are exposing not their own failings, so much as they are exposing YOUR limits, YOUR inability to be with someone who is different, YOUR discomfort in allowing them to be who they are and yourself to show up as you are. It’s hard in those moments to want to be as compassionate and kind as we profess ourselves to want to be. It’s hard to want to do something—like be compassionate or understanding—for someone who is playing a part in our experience of pain.
Noticing
At first, it’s hard. That’s why noticing your reactions and not getting reactive, becomes the first step.
When someone irritates you, take that in. There’s this radical thing that we can do to parse it out–take a moment. Breathe. Stop the conversation until we’ve had some time to think, to question, to ask ourselves what exactly it is that we’re feeling.
We were given these amazing bodies, capable of feeling so many sensations. Let’s use them to parse through our experience.
Choosing (Again and Again)
You won’t get it perfect. Your cover will be blown. And again, another opportunity: to choose.
My cover is blown regularly, and I re-dedicate myself all of the time to the tools of courage, reframing and redefining fear, examining my Stories, forgiveness, and perhaps most importantly, practicing gentleness with myself when–sigh–I went into an interaction with every intention of showing up with love, and then I fell back on fear and lash out or punish with silence.
No one is perfect, so every time we decide to choose and choose again, we’re doing our work.
What are you choosing, right now? That’s a great guiding question in the moments when you feel irritation and frustration and suspect that your cover might have been blown.
It’s not the worst thing in the world when the parts of us that are reactive are exposed—because that’s the opportunity to get conscious and choose differently.