This is a Shelf Life of a type I have not done in a while: A Shelf Life that has no discernible ties to writing. This is a Shelf Life about a general life skill I have lovingly cultivated over my lifetime and I think it may be interesting or helpful to all kinds of people, including writers. Life Skill Shelf Life, hold the shelf.
Everybody has to deal with impossible people sometimes. I don’t mean “impossible people” like people with three heads or people from other planets, but more like people who are rude, unkind, condescending, gossipy, or lean into other behaviors that make them difficult to get along with. In life, everybody has to deal with impossible people sometimes. We don’t have to make them our best bosom buddies but sometimes there are going to be people we have to tolerate with grace even though we would prefer to pick a fight or perhaps just avoid altogether.
I mean, this is relevant to writers. Writers have to deal with impossible people in the course of a writing career; there will be people at the publishing company or people who approach you at a convention or just run-of-the-mill readers who are not avoidable and whose behavior you can’t deter in any way. As a person who works at the publishing company, I assure you there are plenty of impossible people at the publishing company. But it’s not relevant just to writers. I’m pretty sure everyone has to deal with people like this sometimes.
Importantly, a person who is an “impossible person” to you is probably not an objectively impossible person. They probably have people who like them and enjoy their company very much. When I’m dealing with someone who is a challenging personality for me I try to remind myself that I am also a challenging personality for plenty of people; I’m an impossible person for some people, too. Some combinations of people and their personalities are just never going to mesh peacefully. This is fine. Not everybody is going to get along and be bestest buds.
However, there are inevitably situations where you have to work with, or otherwise unavoidably be around, someone who pushes your buttons, makes you angry or upset, or who you just don’t like. It’s not always possible to have the adult conversation and say, “Hey we don’t really get along can we just interact as little as possible?” It’s not always possible, in all contexts, to stand up to someone who is being inappropriate—rude, unkind, et cetera—and stop their behavior or even remove yourself from the situation.
Imagine you are a barista and a customer is berating you because they want their coffee to be exactly 197.3 degrees (F) and you know for a fact that it’s impossible to serve coffee at that precise a temperature, but you also can’t tell them to go die in a fiery car wreck, or throw their slightly-too-cool-or-hot coffee on them, because you are at your job and it is your livelihood and impossible as that person may be, telling them off would put your livelihood in jeopardy. Impossible people are rarely or never worth jeopardizing your own well-being.
It also helps me to remember—to try to remember, or at least remind myself—that I can’t change people. Even when people want to change it takes years of work and self-reflection and usually some therapy so it’s completely unreasonable to expect that I can make someone change their behavior when they probably don’t even want to change. I can only control my own behavior in response to people so that’s the tactic I try to use.
Sometimes when someone is really getting my goat I will snap at them or say something sarcastic or unkind and in the moment I’m like, “okay nice, that showed them” but then later reflecting on it I wish I had just been the bigger person and not reacted to unkindness with unkindness or rudeness with rudeness. The effects of dealing with an unpleasant person would have already faded and been forgotten but when I’m disappointed in my own behavior that lingers longer and I don’t really want to have to feel, at the end of the day, like I was a jerk to someone (even if I think they deserved it).
I have two methods for dealing with difficult or impossible people that I use to get through and then escape interactions without conflict, without resorting to rudeness or unkindness on my part, hopefully without encouraging the person to seek my company again for future interactions, so I can sleep easy at night with the knowledge that I was my best self and did not set anybody on fire that day. They are:
The Gray Rock Method, and
The Play Dumb Method
Gray Rock Method
I did not invent the gray rock method but neither do I recall where I learned it. I have been using it for a long time now and it works really well in any situation where someone is trying to get a rise out of me—that is, when someone is trying to incite a response of some kind. This is a great technique when someone is trying to goad you into an argument with them, when someone is bombarding you with pressure to do something or agree with something you’re not interested in, when someone is gossiping to you, or when someone is trying to involve you in some kind of interpersonal drama.
The trick is to pretend you are a gray rock. Here, this is you:
The idea is to make yourself completely uninteresting and unresponsive to the person who is trying to engage you. Keep your facial expression and body language neutral, nod unenthusiastically, and, when prompted for your thoughts or a reaction, respond with “uh huh,” “mhmm,” or “I see.”
The gray rock method works well because it denies the other person the thing they’re after, which is a response from you. They want you to engage them in an argument, debate them, to be angry or shocked at what they’re saying, to join in gossiping with them, or to participate in whatever drama they have going on. If you simple do not do that—respond, engage, or join in—you make yourself an uninteresting, unappealing conversation partner for them and that is what you want. Let them seek out somebody else who might be interested in arguing with them or gossiping.
At the heart of any of these methods is figuring out what reaction somebody is trying to get from you, or what somebody wants you to do, and gently but steadfastly refusing to indulge whatever that is so they just leave you alone of their own accord.
Somebody’s going off on an incendiary political rant? Give ’em the good old gray rock—neutral expression, no verbal response. They will lose interest and go find someone else to agree with or argue with them, since that’s what they want. Channel the spirit of the gray rock. Become one with the gray rock. A gray rock does not care about the upcoming election cycle, or that Linda’s husband is cheating on her with the nanny. A gray rock just wants to absorb some sun and perhaps play host to a small lizard who is interested in doing the same. Be the gray rock.
Play Dumb Method
This is my favorite way to deal with people who are being unkind, sarcastic, passive aggressive, or condescending. People making jokes at other people’s expense (works great with attempts at racist, misogynistic, and queerphobic humor) are a prime target. The trick is to simply refuse to understand the joke, inference, or allusion and ask the person who made the comment to explain it to you.
The driving force behind unkind jokes (especially racist and other discriminatory jokes) as well as behind sarcasm and passive aggression is that the person making the comment leaves some part of what they mean unsaid and relies upon the listener to make the inference to understand their full meaning. Usually the really objectionable part is the part you’re supposed to infer. That’s by design. These types of comments are meant to give the speaker some plausible deniability. If the listener agrees with the comment (or laughs at the joke), then the speaker feels immune to repercussions because the listener (ostensibly) feels the same way. If the listener disagrees with the comment, or doesn’t get the joke, or even calls the speaker out, then the speaker can pretend like they meant something else.
You’re not always in a position to speak up and say, “Hey that’s not cool” or “That’s uncalled for.” If you can’t, you can instead employ the play dumb method:
I don’t understand.
What do you mean?
Can you explain the joke?
For example:
Them: It’s no surprise that Brenda’s not here.
You: What do you mean? I don’t understand.
Them: You know how she is.
You: No, I don’t. Can you explain?
I’m leaving that deliberately vague because “they” in this scenario could be implying anything about Brenda. Sometimes you play dumb and you get a real answer like, “Brenda’s often 3 to 5 minutes late to meetings” and you’re like “okay, fair enough, let’s make small talk till she gets here.” Sometimes you get an answer like, “Well, you know, she’s Italian,” and you’re like, “What?” and they’re like, “Italians are always late.”
Asking the speaker to explain what they mean puts them in the position of either saying the quiet part out loud—which they don’t want to do or they would have just said it in the first place—or backing down and dropping it. People who are perfectly content to be passive aggressive all day long often wilt the second they’re put in the position of being aggressive aggressive.
When it’s not possible or not safe to say outright to somebody “I don’t condone this behavior,” for instance if you’re dealing with someone at work with more authority, refusing to make the inference sends the same message—that you don’t agree with what they’re saying.
But what if people think you actually are dumb, or obtuse, or that your social intelligence is low? I mean, personally I’m fine with people thinking any of those things about me. I actually love it when people think I’m stupid. But I also understand that most people probably don’t want others in the workplace thinking that. That is fair. However, asking someone to explain an inference they’ve made so you don’t misinterpret is not actually dumb. It’s a smart thing to do pretty much 100 percent of the time. If someone has a problem with you asking for something unspoken to be clarified, that’s a red flag on their behavior, not yours.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.