Happy Women's History Month Reader!
It started with a text.
Two words: Grand Rising.
Now, I have feelings about “Grand Rising.” Strong ones.
Feelings I have never once communicated to the person who sent it. And by all accounts, they were simply trying to greet me warmly on a Tuesday morning.
Did that matter in the moment?
It did not.
I hit thumbs down and kept it moving.
And then approximately four seconds later, blood rushed my face and I was ashamed of my hasty reaction.
I realized something uncomfortable. My friend had absolutely no idea why they were receiving that response.
None. Zero context.
They came in peace. With a greeting. And I shot them down.
I went back and removed the emoji.
But I couldn’t remove the awareness of what had just happened inside me.
The immediate revolt.
The snap reaction.
The micro-punishment delivered to someone who didn’t even know there was a crime.
That’s the internal violence I want to discuss today.
Not actual harm. The quieter kind. . . the kind that happens inside our reactions before anyone else even knows what’s going on.
We do this more than we realize. (Or maybe it's just me . . .)
Someone uses a phrase we find grating.
Sends a message in a tone that rubs us wrong.
Or, does the thing we’ve quietly decided means something about their character.
And we respond. Not really to them - but to the whole story we’ve already written in our heads about what that thing means.
They don’t get our context.
They just get the thumbs down.
And often?
They have no idea.
I teach a simple practice: Pause. Notice. Decide.
It’s a way of moving through moments of friction. Especially where the stakes of unexamined reactions can be significant. For me, this is a person who I care for deeply and the relationship is still layered in nuance.
- Pause creates space between what happened and what you do next.
- Notice asks you to get honest about what’s actually going on inside you.
- Decide puts the agency back in your hands.
I did not do any of that before I hit thumbs down.
I did eventually do all of it. Just in the wrong order, after the damage was already sent.
Fortunately, I caught it.
I asked myself a simple question. Does this person have any idea why I responded this way?
And when the answer was clearly no, I course-corrected.
That’s something.
But imagine if I started with pause, notice, decide.
Here’s the question that's coming up for me and I'm asking you to consider . . .
Who in your life might be quietly getting the thumbs down for something they don’t even know they did?
And what would it look like to pause before the reaction instead of after?
You don’t have to be perfect. I’m clearly not.
But we do have the opportunity, in almost every moment, to choose something other than violence.
Even when Grand Rising makes our eye twitch.
