the cost of being understanding
The cost of being understanding is that the second you choose to not be, you are cold and unempathetic.
And even if it hasn't happened yet, and those words have not been said yet, you have already anticipated them.
There will never be a shortage of people experiencing mistreatment or even believing that they were mistreated (not talked about in this blog post), and that means I'm nothing special. The matter of fact is that this is inevitable.
As we grow older, we are learning how to be people. As such, there will be accidents and things we didn't mean to say nor do. The impact of our actions sometimes do not match our intentions.
Talking about intentions though, there are people who cannot fathom just how the impact of their actions do not match their intentions. It is as though intentions come first, but the reality is that impact cannot be controlled. We are continuously interpreting people's actions (and that is often intermingled with intention) through our individual lenses, comprising of mostly pattern we recognise. It does not mean that the intention means nothing, however, it just means that the mismatched impact should be acknowledged.
As someone whose native language is to listen, however, I've noticed that over the decades, people have leveraged, taken advantage and exploited this. I have become attuned to people's needs and underlying messages just from their language, and it's become exhausting - I've tried to reduce my exhaustion by listening only to the words being said, and frankly, I'm often left winded by the existence of people.
And there were times I've tried to be as attuned and the listener, but the second I choose to speak my mind, I've been accused of exploiting what was said to me in confidence.
That is to say, there is a cost to being understanding, nice and kind: you're rarely allowed to be you.