Mistreated

April 9

Today you will be mistreated.

It’s almost a certainty. Your asshole of a manager will take it out on you, or the car in front of you will pick a fight, or you’ll get both barrels of childhood trauma from a stranger—or a friend.

Something will invariably go wrong and you’ll be on the shit end of the stick, trying to figure out the sequence of events that lead to this moment.

Much of our lives are constructed not around getting things right, but around not getting things wrong. And that’s good advice, to a point. Plenty of things in our lives can go wrong, and it’s the responsibility of our internal adult to think far enough ahead to avoid pitfalls. We go from rational to psychotic, convinced if we just worked hard enough and thought far enough ahead that nothing will go wrong and no one will ever mistreat us.

The truth becomes something more like this: today, someone will mistreat you.

When you accept this as a certainty, you can prepare a different way, telling yourself:

Someone today will mistreat me, and it almost certainly has nothing to do with me.

If it’s my fault, I’ll take responsibility.

If it’s not my fault, I’ll let it fall off me like water.

If they pick a fight, I’ll fight like hell.

And if no one mistreats me today—well, then I’ll be grateful instead of assuming it was what I deserve.

Morning Reading is a daily email to help center yourself, reflect, and prepare for the day. It’s sent with love from your friend, Zach in Austin, Texas. He even drew the logo himself.

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