How To Cope With Petty People

Pettiness is almost never personal

Sometime around eighth grade, I dropped and smashed one of the school laptops in front of my entire class.

My peers looked up and almost unanimously burst out laughing. Someone shouted “Well done!” I froze. I looked at the teacher waiting for him to start yelling.

But instead, he did something that stuck in my mind. He stood up, told the class to be quiet, picked up the broken laptop and tossed it in a drawer. Then he looked me straight in the eye and told me to get another one out. He never mentioned it again.

Even after years, I still remember that moment as one of those subtle experiences that changed, however slightly, how I saw the world. It was the first time I’d been aware of someone having valid grounds for being angry, yet choosing not to be.

That teacher took the high road. They recognised the futility of anger over a mistake I was unlikely to repeat. And that anger would only make me fear his class in the future. That moment was significant because it taught me about the true nature of pettiness.

The reality is that pettiness is rarely personal.

Pettiness is not the same as setting boundaries or ensuring you don’t let things escalate. It’s the act of responding in an over the top, vindictive, deliberately hurtful way over something that is meaningless.

It can involve revenge-seeking behaviour, whether that revenge is something tangible (a physical consequence) or intangible (negative emotions, like guilt.) The petty person wants you to pay and they want you to suffer. They’re not out to educate or to help.

Instead of ignoring it or explaining what’s wrong, the petty person lashes out. Their reactions can be so disproportionate that we doubt our own judgment. Petty people make us wonder is we are, as we sometimes suspect late at night, terrible people. They make us…

Related posts:

Sang mentari yang kala itu masih bersinggah di langit tampak mulai lelah memberikan sinarnya namun enggan untuk berhenti lantaran dirinya masih memiliki waktu yang tersisa sebelum kembali ke…

The longer your stools are left in your bowel, the harder and more uncomfortable they become to get rid of. Eating highly processed foods is one of the major culprits. They contain so many artificial…

Research shows that the majority of people has dealt with stress-related issues at least once in their lifetime. Stress is related to a “perceived danger” that doesn’t have to be life-threatening but…