I have, on more than one occasion, rewritten a text message four times before sending something that reads, to any reasonable observer, as entirely unremarkable. “See you Thursday.” Four drafts. Not because the information was complicated. Because somewhere in my head there’s a small, permanently employed committee whose entire job is to review outgoing messages for tone, and the committee does not release anything without a fight.
I’d love to say I’ve grown out of this. I check my phone twenty minutes after sending something mildly important to see if it’s been read. I have, more than once, replayed a two-line comment I made in a meeting three days ago, wondering if it landed the way I meant it to, or the way I’m now convinced it didn’t.
None of the people I’m doing this about are thinking about me at all. I know this. Everyone knows this, in theory. It doesn’t stop the committee from meeting.
I think the honest answer is that we’re not actually worried about being disliked in the abstract. We’re worried about being wrong about ourselves. If someone thinks less of me than I think they should, that’s not really a comment on them, it feels like evidence. Like maybe the version of myself I’ve been quietly building and presenting to the world has a flaw in it that other people can see and I can’t. That’s the part that keeps you awake, not the opinion itself, but the fear that the opinion might be accurate.
It’s a strange kind of vanity, when you actually look at it. We assume people are paying close enough attention to form a detailed judgement about a comment we made in passing, when in reality most people are far too occupied running their own internal committee to spend much time auditing ours. I’ve walked away from conversations convinced I said something slightly off, only to see the other person post something online an hour later that makes it very clear they’ve already moved entirely on to their own unrelated crisis.
We know this. We still check.
I think some of it comes from genuinely caring what happens to the people around us, which isn’t a flaw, it’s just been aimed at the wrong target. The instinct is a good one. Noticing how your words land, adjusting when you’ve overstepped, caring whether you’ve hurt someone, all of that is decent behaviour. The problem is when the instinct stops being about the other person entirely and becomes about protecting an image of yourself that was never as fragile as you think it is.
I’ve started asking myself, when the committee convenes at an unreasonable hour, whether the opinion in question belongs to someone whose judgement I actually trust, someone who knows the full context, who’s earned the right to have a say in how I feel about myself. Most of the opinions keeping me up at night fail that test immediately. A stranger’s passing comment. A colleague I’ve spoken to twice. People whose view of me, however confidently held, was formed with almost none of the information required to hold it fairly.
The opinions that should actually matter are usually quiet about it. They don’t need to be replayed, because they were never delivered as a verdict in the first place. They were just someone who knows you well enough to say the true thing kindly, and trust you to hear it.
Those are rare. They’re also the only ones worth losing sleep over, and even then, not much.
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