When I was in elementary school, I had a falling out with my circle of friends. It is a scene I have since seen played out on many different stages with many different girls in very similar circumstances. The social hierarchy of young people is unstable and unforgiving. My circumstances seemed particularly harsh and I would be dishonest if I didn’t confess that the effects of the treatment I received at the hands of my former friends didn’t leave me traumatized.

Kids would taunt me. Threaten me. Spread lies about me. They would go out of their way to poison what few relationships remained to me. They distracted me from my school work. I had to physically defend myself at least once, and the vice principal walked me home after turning away an angry mob that had gathered outside of school to follow me home. It was not the first large group of former friends who would trail after me, yelling epithets, until I reached the apartment that was both refuge and prison.

The harassment stopped after the incident with the vice principal. I had to explain to my father how I had been mercilessly bullied and what small infraction had set off the insane, disproportionate response. My father flew into a rage. He dragged me to my former best friend’s apartment building, and I watched as he told her mother and stepfather that if their daughter ever bothered me, laid a hand on me, or looked at me cross-eyed ever again, he was going to kill everyone in their family.

While terrifying, it was effective in quelling the overt hostility. The angry harassment changed to passive ostracism. I simply ceased to exist. While a relief, I no longer lived in the sickening anxiety that had plagued me for weeks, it did nothing to set right the wrongs. I was completely outcast and painfully lonely.

For a very, very long time I came to second-guess myself and downplay my strengths and good fortunes. I responded to compliments superstitiously, with self-deprecation, for fear of being branded conceited or uppity. I fought my anxieties with anger, which only served to fuel jealousy and paranoia as I got older.

There was also another side effect. I could not pass a group of people who were talking or laughing without the distinct feeling that they were talking about or laughing at me.

I thought about this the other day, as I rested my pinched, aching feet after a long schlep into the city for my performance review at work. I had received glowing praise and I felt I had really earned it; I spent the last two years making serious inroads on professional shortcomings. I sat in a fast food restaurant with a package of french fries and a bottle of water, contemplating my day and sighing over the hour and a half drive that still stretched before me when I heard a peal of laughter from behind me.

Sitting at another table was a group of young people, loudly talking and laughing and generally carrying on in the boisterous way that self-assured and invincible teenagers have. Not the quiet maunderings of outcasts, but the confident outbursts of the popular. At other points in my life, that laughter would have sent a cold sliver of remembered shame and anxiety down my back but as I sat there munching on a slightly wilted fry, it occurred to me that I felt…nothing.

No response. I had no visceral response. Where before I had been a virtual Pavlov’s dog of emotions, I realized that somewhere along the way, somewhere along my journey of workshopping my issues, I had let go of that old trauma. I no longer took it personally, I no longer assumed that laughter, derision, muffled whispers were directed at me. I assumed that these young people were just having fun.

Somewhere in my life someone once told me that I look for the injury in everything people say to me, that I am constantly on hyper-alert for insult. It’s a very defensive, high-strung existence. It breeds paranoia, petty jealousies that consume relationships in hot flames of rage and anxieties. It alienates others and it creates self-fulfilling prophecies. I had put up this force field, this hypersensitive alarm system, to protect myself from ever feeling the kind of hurt I had gone through as a child ever again. I learned that people lie and betray and injure and in order to protect myself from it, I had to catch it before it could do me harm.

As an adult, however, I am learning different. I am learning that some injuries aren’t worth registering. I am learning that I cannot control everything in my life, I cannot control how I feel, how others feel, how they treat me, I can only control how I respond and act. I can act like a vigilant lunatic with my hypersensitive forcefield, or I can accept that sometimes hurt is a part of life and enjoy the rest of it, to relax and let go of what I can’t control or change.

My counselor commented that I live a lot in my head and she’s right, I do. I have entire other universes in my head. I have discovered that it’s a very self-centered way to live and while I think sometimes that’s ok, I think most of the time, it’s probably not what other people need from me. It’s difficult for other people to relate to me when I relate everything to myself.

That’s what I have been thinking about for the last few days. I’m working on it. Working on not assuming that people act upon me, but that people act on their own, personal imperatives. Sometimes they just do things and they do it without any thought or regard for me, I just happen to be there when it happens. It’s not personal. It just is. My job now is to stop myself before my imagination runs away with me, before my anger gets kindled, before I spiral into a deluded depression. My job is to backtrack, to think—not of the injury, but of other explanations for someone else’s behavior, and to ask myself why I responded to it the way that I did.

I never get the easy jobs.