I’m Banging My Head Against a Wall

My Head is Bleeding but the Wall’s Not Budging

photo by Stephano Pollio on Unsplash

Sometimes I just want to give up. I get so discouraged by people who just don’t want to even try to open their minds to anything different from what they already know.

I put into practice my best “deep listening” skills when interacting with these people, I try to empathize with where they’re coming from, I try to find some mutual point of view between us, but I realize that these people don’t want to put in any effort at all for listening to me.

They either pretend to listen (while their responses show that maybe they heard, but they didn’t listen), or, worse, they just continue to state their original point of view, only this time even louder.

I am not asking these people to change their point of view to my point of view; I am only asking that they at least listen to what I am saying in the same manner that I listened to them. But, that rarely happens.

I’m not a person who talks constantly. I learned at a very young age that the less I talked, the more I was listened to when I did speak. A person who can’t stop chattering is usually tuned out.

So, I limit voicing my opinion to what I consider to be “the important stuff” — issues of injustice, climate change, racism, scams…