How to Stop Being Angry with Obnoxious People
By: Flannery Meehan
Tags: Anger, Happiness, Self, Acceptance, Communication

Case Study: A Traumatic Situation

I learned to apply these lessons after my neighbor and friend, A., killed herself. Although we knew she was depressed, this event came as a shock. I cared for her cat, and I spent way too much time in her apartment. There, I learned things about my friend that broke my heart.

I waited for her family to adopt the cat, but they were delayed for understandable reasons. I attached great importance to this boisterous tomcat, as did her family. A. had cherished him, even though he made messes, bit, and cuddled aggressively. To me, he was sacred — a spiritual remnant of my friend.

I lived down a hall and on the other side of the building from A. Her closest neighbor was a man I’ll call Daniel. He knew A. better than I did and had even briefly dated her. Still, during her frequent trips out of town, she never asked Daniel to cat-sit. I did it, or another one of our girlfriends did.

Daniel sobbed when he found out A. had died. He was shocked to learn she had been so sad. He said he had been depressed for years and understood the impulse to give up on life.

Daniel and I were the oldest tenants in the building, but we didn’t approach life the same way. While I feverishly worked, waking up early in the morning and coming home late and doing extra work as a writer at night, Daniel slept in, smoked a bowl on the balcony, and spent half the day on his small business. At night when I was coming home from the gym, he was drinking beers and smoking with his friends and our neighbors on the balcony. Most of them were younger girls and guys who looked up to him because he is charming and light-hearted. Sometimes he sold them his Adderall—once he even gave me a pill for free because I was on a deadline.

Daniel always said hello to me, but I wasn’t always happy to speak to him. I found his lifestyle childish and sleazy.

When A. had been gone for a month, I started sharing the responsibility of taking care of her cat with other neighbors. It had become too much for me. The cat was so lonesome that it provoked my guilt, and that apartment full of self-help books and sticky notes A. had written to herself and put on walls and mirrors to help boost her spirits felt tragic. I regretted how I had acted with her in the last days of her life, when I had no idea she would soon give up completely. If only I had said something more powerful.

Every neighbor volunteered to drop by, feed, and pet the tomcat, except for Daniel. I saw him nearly every time I was coming and going from A.’s apartment, and every time he smiled and said hello. Once he made a comment that the cat had made a big mess and been annoying on a long-ago occasion when he had cared for the cat while A. had been on vacation.

This comment hurt me; I cringed physically. Insulting the cat was, to me, like spitting on our friend’s grave.

After two months of suffering alone in the apartment, the cat was taken in by A.’s relatives in another state. I ran into Daniel on the stairs a few days later, and he said he was glad someone else was now responsible for the cat so that the neighbors no longer had the burden of caring for him.

This comment sent me into a rage. A burden? Not only did most of us accept the depressing responsibility of the cat because we missed our lost friend and wanted to honor this creature she had left behind, but the idea that Daniel could feel burdened when he had done nothing to help seemed so morally reprobate that I started to resent him hatefully.

While I seethed in my apartment, he stood on the porch with our neighbors, drinking beer, smoking pot and cigarettes, and laughing. I could hear the girls laughing in response to his jokes — the college students he sold Adderall to. He’s corrupting those girls, I thought.

As I drifted off to sleep to the sound of Daniel’s laugh, Lao Tzu returned to my thoughts. It dawned on me, looking through the lens of Lao Tzu’s teachings, that Daniel was providing something of value to the people in our building: pleasure, relaxation, and camaraderie.

I was the one who had created the distinction between us — bad versus good. It was only my opinion that young adults should not smoke pot, take Adderall not prescribed to them, and party with men in their late 30s. But those girls obviously didn’t agree with me, and who was I to determine what was and wasn’t good for them? They were adults by law, living on their own. Maybe they had ADHD. Maybe they were corrupt, more so than Daniel. And why was I so much better than all of them? When was the last time I had chatted amiably with my neighbors and provided them with humor? I was always tense, running up and down the stairs and shouting strained hellos and goodbyes because I was busy trying to advance my life.

What value I had to the building community was as a sort of house mother, someone who looked out for younger people and cats. Daniel was lackadaisical and funny, and people enjoyed his energy. I helped the younger neighbors when they needed advice, a ride to the airport, or a job reference. We both added value.

Lao Tzu’s message humbled me. I stopped resenting Daniel and ceased to do so for months.

But he provoked me again when he went to live with a new girlfriend and failed to pay rent, leaving his apartment without moving out of it. What a jerk! I was friends not only with my landlord, but with my landlord’s parents, a generous elderly couple who always replaced what broke in my apartment, took me out to dinner, and invited me to their Christmas parties. My indignation this time was on behalf of them.

The landlord lived in another state. But when Daniel moved out, he came to town to stay at his parents’ house and remodel Daniel’s unit and a few other units. Daniel’s apartment was a wreck, and the floors had to be replaced. I think it had been in bad shape when he had moved in, and, being a low-key, undemanding person, he had never complained. When I had dinner with our landlord, he told me that Daniel had not paid rent in months.

“He’s a selfish, childish asshole,” I said.

Our landlord laughed. “He’s not that bad.” His twinkling eyes showed me my error of hate.

I was stunned into silence. Why should I be angry on behalf of the landlord when he didn’t feel wronged? That was definitely a waste of energy.

Later, when time had lessened the trauma of losing A., I was able to question even my reaction to Daniel’s disinterest in sharing the cat-sitting duties. A. and Daniel hadn’t had a good relationship. Since they had briefly dated, they had had awkward interactions and a few arguments. Her death had caused me to render her a perfect martyr who had died from depression. But she had been imperfect, like all humans. That’s how Daniel had seen her. And he hadn’t had my imagination when he had looked at the cat. To him, it had just been a cat, not a spiritual connection to a martyr. Perhaps Daniel was more realistic and pragmatic than I. There is no question that I tend towards the melodramatic.

Lao Tzu and step four of my 12-step program taught me to reconsider my resentment. What it came down to was that my way of seeing a dynamic was not the absolute truth. It was my truth, and that was all. Trying to impose it on other people was dogmatic and naive. Everyone in that building and the landlord had a different way of perceiving A. and of reacting to her suicide and to Daniel. But so much of my life had been spent foolishly trying to insist that my truth was the truth. It certainly didn’t help me, and it didn’t change the situations I resented or people such as Daniel. So what was the point?