Walking on eggshells. And who actually laid the floor.
I've been wrestling with this one for a while. Not sure I have it figured out. Thinking out loud with you.
We've been handed a script. Two roles. You get cast in one whether you auditioned or not.
Role one. The impossible person. Volatile. Moody. You never know which version walks through the door at six o'clock.
Role two. Everybody else. Careful. Measured. Reading the room before you're all the way in it. Scanning for the sigh, the flat tone, the jaw that just tightened.
And psychology has a name for role two. Walking on eggshells.
Here's what bothers me. That script never asks the second person a single hard question. It hands them a grievance and calls it a diagnosis.
So let me ask it. When I'm tiptoeing, what am I actually doing?
I want to say I'm being considerate. Mature. Meeting someone where they are. A soft answer turns away wrath, Proverbs 15:1. Those are real.
And if that's genuinely what's happening? Then it isn't eggshells at all. It's maturity. And maturity doesn't usually describe itself as suffering.
But sometimes that's not what's happening. Sometimes I'm not being considerate. I'm managing.
Different thing.
Consideration looks outward. What does this person need. Can I offer it.
Management looks inward. What do I have to do to avoid the thing I don't want to deal with.
One's a gift. The other's a transaction. And I'm the only one collecting.
You can tell which one you did by how you feel after. Consideration leaves you steady. Management leaves you resentful, tight in the chest, running the conversation back at midnight. Because you paid something and didn't get what you thought you were buying.
That resentment isn't proof they're impossible. It's proof I was trading.
Keep going with me here, because it gets worse before it gets better.
Mindfulness requires maturity. Requires critical thinking. Actual effort. So when I'm walking on eggshells, most of the time it's an excuse for not doing that work.
Think about what that actually looks like. The careful step. The weight shifted onto the ball of the foot before it lands. Listening for the crackle underneath before you commit to it.
We call that protection. It isn't.
Protection stands somewhere. Avoidance moves. And everything about tiptoeing is movement designed not to be noticed.
I'm not guarding anything when I do that. I'm just hoping the floor holds long enough that I don't have to say the thing I don't want to say.
And let me head something off. This isn't naivety. I'm not the guy who can't see what's happening in front of him.
It isn't people pleasing either. That's a reflex. Somebody gets uncomfortable, you move. No thought in it, just a nerve firing.
Nothing a thinker does is accidental. If I decide to meet you where you are, that was a decision. Weighed. Chosen. I know exactly what I'm carrying and I picked it up on purpose.
The empath who absorbs everything isn't loving anybody. They're medicating themselves with somebody else's approval.
Deliberate looks nothing like that.
Although you can start there. Most people do. That reflex is usually what puts somebody in a relationship where eggshells feel necessary in the first place. But starting there doesn't mean staying there.
Now. Yes, some people manipulate. Deliberately. Real thing, not waving it off. And this is not a case for putting up with abuse. Not even close. If someone is harming you, get out and get help. That's wisdom, not weakness.
But that behavior is theirs. Stays theirs whether I react or not. Which puts the question right back where it started.
The eggshells only work if I agreed to stand on them.
That's the uncomfortable part. If I'm walking careful across a floor somebody else laid, at some point I said yes to the floor.
Maybe not out loud. Maybe I said yes by never saying no.
But it took my participation. And participation is a choice even when it doesn't feel like one.
Now look at Galatians 6. Paul says bear one another's burdens, verse 2. Three verses later, each one will bear his own load, verse 5.
Same chapter. Practically the same breath. People treat those like a contradiction.
They're not. That's the whole architecture. Carry each other. And still answer for yourself.
Because we're not judged as a crowd. No groupthink at the judgment seat. No committee. Just you, accountable for what you did with what you were handed.
So if God put somebody difficult in your life, and a lot of that difficulty is inherited, not chosen, he already knew what he was doing. He knows what you can carry. It landed on you because you can hold it.
Two options. Handle it seriously. Or write the person off.
Most of us pick the second one and call it protecting our peace.
And look at what that costs. Not just our own footing. We lose the chance to be the one who actually loved somebody through what they inherited.
They didn't pick it. Somebody handed it to them, probably before they could say no. And earnest effort, real love with weight behind it, is one of the few things that heals that.
Eggshells never healed anybody. Just keeps the room quiet.
Which brings me back to perception. Because that was always the whole thing, wasn't it.
Two people. Same room. Same six words in the same flat voice. One hears an attack. One hears a bad day.
Same data. Different floor.
So the question was never whether they're difficult. Maybe they are.
The question is whether I'm going to be mindful and mature and take a person where they're at because I chose to.
Or whether I'm going to be the manufactured victim. And I mean manufactured. Not somebody who got hurt, that's real and it happens. I mean somebody who assembled the role. Chose the framing. Decided in advance the story has a villain in it and I'm not it.
That's a construction project. Takes work to build. Just doesn't feel like work, because it feels like being wronged.
All of it looking a lot like kindness from the outside the whole time.
And here's what keeps me honest.
Not one of us could look God in the face and say we're any better than anybody else. Not one. Whether what we're carrying was intentional or inherited, we all showed up with something we didn't fix on our own.
So the difficult person in your life? Different inheritance. Not a different species.
I don't have this fully worked out. But I know which of those two I want to be. And I know it's not the one that needs everybody else to change first.
Dig In, Chew on it. Write me back.
Proverbs 15:1
Galatians 6:2
Galatians 6:5
