(#2) negativity is consuming.

I’m not usually the one to flaunt the nitty-gritty personal details of my life, especially not around here, but sometimes the details are needed to make a point. Last weekend, J and I had a fight about something very insignificant. Granted, if you know me, you can probably imagine that fighting with me isn’t an aggressive affair - more silence than shouting.

At any rate, we had just seen The Imitation Game, the late showing, after spending a strangely warm evening walking all the way downtown, and to the National Christmas Tree, and then to the theater. As we walked out, me misty-eyed (as I usually am after any movie ever), J began to offer his critique. He thought the movie was fine, but he had thoughts (as he usually does) about what could have been better.

After four years, I know this is just something that he does. He is a passionate, working artist and everything we see or experience is fuel for that. He doesn’t critique a film because he likes to wallow in maliciously deconstructing the work of others. He does it because that’s what artists do, especially artists like him.

I told you we had a silly fight, but I haven’t explained it yet. We left the theater, J started his critique, and I interrupted him with, Why do you have to be SO NEGATIVE all the time? He stopped talking.

The irony is, in the past year, I have found myself dangerously prone to negativity. Which brings me to my second reflection:

Negativity is consuming.

We made our way outside and into a taxi, and I can’t even remember what I said next, but somehow it quickly devolved into a whisper-scolding in the backseat of that taxi as I complained that he was always negative and couldn’t just enjoy anything and always had to make me feel like I was stupid for liking something. As you can probably guess, none of that is true, but I said it nonetheless.

I heard once, and I believe it firmly, that the things that bother or annoy us in other people are often character traits we possess. J wasn’t being bogged down by negativity, but I was quick to interpret it that way because I was bogged down.

This isn’t a reflection with a simple three-point strategy for solving. It also isn’t meant to be a self-deprecating shame-fest. And to be perfectly honest, if you know me, you probably don’t think of me as a negative person. I smile a lot and very often Pollyanna my way through things, at least on the face of it.

But my reflection is that I have let negative, complaint-filled thinking permeate my life this year, and I don’t like what that looks like. I don’t like how it makes me feel or how it makes me think or how it makes me act. I have seen firsthand that when I let myself vent for 15 minutes about something “because it makes me feel better,” it doesn’t make me feel better. Rather, it colors the subject of my complaint (and the larger world) as completely terrible, and then I get the pleasure of living in that terrible world that I built for myself.

There are times to be critical. There are times to fight. But on the whole, I don’t want my life to have that bleak, dull, unending undercurrent of negativity. It is consuming, and I don’t want it to consume me.