The hardest part of my life

Is learning to quell my emotional reaction to disagreement.

Being on the extreme end of the spectrum of agreeableness, I have to constantly reconcile the necessary (sometimes completely unavoidable) interpersonal dissension with the desire to question others’ beliefs to learn more about the world. 

The reason I shared the quote on the previous post was because I’m predisposed to make disagreement or apparent conflict a larger problem than it is; I am prone to dwelling on the minutiae of those past interactions and amplifying the very visceral stress of the emotional tension and confrontation—a frantic scry revealing lost friendship, a harrowing premonition of continued conflict, a debilitating, insuperable but entirely contrived despair. These types of thoughts have haunted me for almost a decade. In the past, I would generally steer clear of confrontation and being the primary instigator in the provocation of a conflict, but as I mature and recalibrate my responsibility as a human being, I now recognize the value in being able to discern the decisive frames of the inevitable discord of our social interactions wherein we can each take the opportunity to learn something new from each other—to build each other up in a way that allows us to mutually benefit by learning to better navigate the world and gradually extricate this bipartisan, polarizing notion of “us against them” from our disagreements. 

But I know that it’s inevitable that I will end up ruffling some feathers, that I will inexorably sever the emotional ties of some of my interpersonal relationships; the years that I’ve spent as a manager have to a small extent inured me to such discomfort, though.