Meeting The Outer Enemy

(mouse clicking) (gentle music) Headspace Studios. Hey friends, it's Rosie. Welcome back to Radio Headspace. When I was in the sixth grade, I went to three different elementary schools in one year. My parents had separated, and we were bouncing around trying to figure out where to live. By the time I landed at the third school, I was withdrawn, quiet, the kind of kid who kept her head down, hoping to just get through the day unnoticed. But of course, that's when I met Anna. Anna was the girl at that school, popular, confident, magnetic. Everyone wanted to be in her orbit, and at first, she let me in. She asked me questions and made me feel seen, and for a moment, I thought, "Finally, a friend." But what she was really doing was collecting information. Within weeks, she was using my answers as ammunition. She and her group of friends would decide, on any given day, whether I was in or out. Some mornings, they'd walk with me, laugh with me, act like we were close. Other days, they'd ignore me completely, whispering, laughing, pretending I didn't exist, and to my 11-year-old mind, it felt like it was all my fault. Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman, in their book, "Love Your Enemies," describe the outer enemy as those people, institutions, or situations that causes harm. Bullies are the clearest example. They thrive on exclusion, humiliation, and control, and when we're on the receiving end, it's easy to collapse into victimhood. In psychology, there's something called the locus of control, and it has to do with whether we believe our lives are shaped by external forces or by our own choices. Bullies push up toward an external locus, where we feel powerless, but when we begin to shift back, when we realize, I can't control them, but I can control how I show up, that's where resilience grows, and by the way, I say this with empathy. It doesn't mean that bullying is easy to deal with. It's horrible. This shift, even if it's small, can hopefully point us to the right direction. Fast forward to my twenties. I had landed my first big career role, managing a business in the beauty industry. I was young, green, eager to prove myself, and once again, I found myself in a familiar dynamic. I wasn't liked. People whispered, excluded me from conversations, and made me feel like the odd one out, and I remember thinking, "Wait a second, I've been here before." The circumstances were different, but the sting was still the same, that mix of shame, self-doubt, and isolation, and I realized that there's always gonna be something like this. There's always gonna be a bully, and it's up to me to figure out how I respond to it, so I started to reflect on the situation in sixth grade, and I realized that it had a huge impact on me. I learned a lot. It taught me how painful...