Someone insults you (and your little dog, too). You can retaliate, whimper—or exercise your own vast power. Martha Beck shows you how to rewrite your own character.
The first time I saw a T-shirt that said "mean people suck," I thought, Now, there is a heartfelt sentiment, succinctly expressed. I only wished I'd been the author. I mention this because recently I've encountered several mean people, and I've had to remind myself that the concept of authorship is key to surviving these experiences.

I don't know about you, but my favorite ways of reacting to mean people are (1) getting mean right back or (2) lying down quietly to display the word welcome! written where my spine used to be. Annoyingly, my job constantly reminds me that there's a more responsible and effective way to live. That's how it is for us authors. I say "us" because you're an author, too. Not all of us write for publication, but every living person has the power of authorship when it comes to composing our lives. Meanness emerges when we believe that we have no such power, that we're passive receptors of life's vagaries. Inner peace follows when we begin responding to cruelty—our own and other people's—with the authority we've possessed all along.

Why are people mean? Here's the short answer: They're hurt. Here's the long answer: They're really hurt. At some point, somebody—their parents, their lovers, Lady Luck—did them dirty. They were crushed. And they're still afraid the pain will never stop, or that it will happen again.

There. I've just described every single person living on planet Earth.

The fact is that we've all been hurt, and we're all wounded, but not all of us are mean. Why not? Because some people realize that their history of suffering can be a hero's saga rather than a victim's whine, depending on how they "write" it. The moment we begin tolerating meanness, in ourselves or others, we are using our authorial power in the service of wrongdoing. We have both the capacity and the obligation to do better.

"You know," I once said to my 7-year-old daughter, "when I was your age, I wanted to go to Sherwood Forest and meet Robin Hood." She looked at me with alarm, then cautiously asked, "Mom, do you know what fiction means?" In retrospect, I have to admit the true answer to this question was no. Sure, I realized that Robin Hood was a fictional character. But I wasn't yet aware how much of my worldview was fiction, how powerfully I was shaping the characters and plot of my own life story.

We perceive events as story lines. We continually (though often unconsciously) tell ourselves tales about life, and since no story can include every tiny event, we edit and spin the facts into the stories we prefer. Many of our stories are pure fabrication, and all of them are biased, dominated by our flair for the dramatic, our theories about life, and our fears. A typical mean person's story line goes like this: "I am a victim; people want to hurt me; I must hurt them first to be safe." This is why mean people may turn ugly when you say something like "Please pass the salt" or "Hey, it's raining." They immediately rewrite whatever they hear to support their story line ("She's saying I'm a bad cook" or "He's bringing up the weather to avoid talking about us"). The story, not other people's behavior, both motivates and excuses their hostility.

If we react to this type of meanness with cruelty of our own, we climb onto the wheel of suffering that drives all conflict, from lovers' spats to wars: You're mean to me so I'm mean to you so you're meaner to me so I'm meaner to you....

We'll stay on this sickening merry-go-round until we decide to get off—and please note that I did not say "when others stop being mean to us." We can ride the wheel of suffering when no one else is even present (telling ourselves the same old sad story again and again), and we can leave it even in the midst of violent persecution. The way out is not found in changing our circumstances but in the power of authorship.

Here are some ways to use that power...

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