This is the Brand and Sherry podcast, sponsored by MetaShare. For more info about the show or about

Brandt's book, Unoffendable, check out brantanson.com. When you move to a new area, you kind of get to

know the people, and this is happening where we are. We moved into a new neighborhood, and it's

in a very dense, urban setting, very diverse, racially. But we keep running into something in our particular area. There's a lot of, I don't know how else to say it, there's a lot of mental instability going on. There's a lot of addiction problems. And I think when you're in that sort of setting, it's just more obvious. It is because you don't have the tools to hide it.

Right. And you can't just pull into your big garage and then you don't ever interact with your neighbors. Like, we see everybody every day. It's all out there. Just to wit, yesterday, it's a one-way street I'm on. There's cars on both sides. There's one lane that goes right down the middle. So cars are facing this direction. I'm going this direction at about 20 miles an hour. And I'm looking ahead and I can see there's a silhouette in the middle of the road. And it's not as big as a car. And I slow down to 15, 10, trying to figure out what's going on up there. As I get closer, I realize it's a person in a powered chair. Okay. Going the opposite direction? Going, coming at me down the middle of the road. Okay. So I come to a complete stop, a full, you know, block, just almost in disbelief. Like, well, what am I supposed to do? I can't get out of the way. Right. There's only one lane. And here comes this person, and it was an old lady coming straight at me,

and she was just going to, she was playing chicken with me.

Okay.

And I was at a complete stop, and she went around me and yelled in my window, like, from a foot away.

Oh.

Scream something about, who do you think you are, some kind of thoroughfare through town she said oh

and right i couldn't understand that either okay and so i just you know lightly stepped on the

gas after she went by and just kept going down the street but what was funny was there's a flash of

anger and i realized once again this has nothing really to do with me. You have to realize when people are behaving a certain way, it's not about you. The other thing is, I have no idea what her history is, what her background is, what's happened to her. Thirdly, I think a lot of times we get angry and I did, and I was like, why did I feel flash of anger?

It's because she made me out to be a bad person.

Nobody wants to be the bad person.

If somebody implicates, however, you know,

just, they just imply something that you're not doing right,

we instantly get angry and defensive about it,

because we all want to think we're good.

I'm like, well, that's her deal. and right, we instantly get angry and defensive about it, because we all want to think we're good.

And like, well, that's her deal.

I can just proceed and drop it.

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