✦ On judgement: 026
Photo by Paul Campbell on Unsplash
Judgment is almost never about the person being judged. This is the uncomfortable truth that most self-help content skips because it requires you to look at something in yourself rather than something in the world. When you notice that a particular kind of person - the one who is too loud, too needy, too boundary-less, too self-promotional, too comfortable taking up space - produces in you a reaction that is sharper than the situation warrants, what you are usually looking at is not a character flaw in them. You are looking at a part of yourself that was told, at some formative and impressionable moment, that that quality was not allowed. That the loudness was unacceptable. That the need was inconvenient. That taking up space was something only certain kinds of people were permitted to do - and you were not one of them. The judgment is the echo of an old prohibition. And the reason it has heat in it, the reason it arrives with that particular charge of irritation or contempt or quiet superiority, is that the prohibition still has power. You are not judging them. You are policing in others the thing you were never allowed to be yourself.
The person who irritates you most is almost always holding, without apology, something you were taught to hide.
Which does not mean the irritation is wrong or that the other person is beyond reproach. It means that the feeling is information about you before it is information about them - and the woman who learns to read her own judgments as a map of her unlived life becomes, over time, someone who moves through the world with considerably more curiosity and considerably less contempt. The practice is not to stop the judgment - judgment arrives before intention can intercept it. The practice is to pause after it arrives and ask: what is this protecting? What does this person have that I was told I couldn’t? What would it cost me to let that prohibition go? Answered honestly, those three questions will tell you more about who you are and what you are carrying than any amount of introspection aimed directly at yourself.
