some thoughts on not letting small things ruin big energy

a personal refusal to lose the plot over minor inconveniences

May 04, 2025

My dog spilled my coffee the other morning. Not in some dramatic cartoon way—just a slow, casual nudge of her nose. She’s tall enough to reach up and over my desk, and in that moment, she just wanted my attention. The mug tipped, soaked a few papers, caught the edge of my keyboard. One of those moments where your body reacts before your brain even catches up. Body tensed, mood started to turn.

I felt it rising—annoyance. The kind that used to own me. That knee-jerk spike where something small derails your morning, then your energy, then your entire outlook for the rest of the day. And a few years ago, that would’ve been enough to set the tone. I’d be muttering under my breath, annoyed that things weren’t going smoothly, maybe snapping at someone on the phone, letting that moment of chaos bleed into every interaction that followed. Because that’s what we do, right? We treat minor inconveniences like omens, like proof that something’s wrong with the day, with the world, with us.

But this time, I paused.

She was near my desk because she loves me. She wasn’t trying to knock anything over—she just wanted to be close. And the truth is, she won’t be around forever. She’s a giant dog, which means maybe ten years if I’m lucky. So instead of letting the irritation win, I wiped up the mess, gave her some cuddles, and walked to the kitchen to make another coffee. It took 40 seconds. No spiral. No story. Just a moment, and then another one. Something that would have wrecked my whole morning a few years ago barely registered as a problem.

That’s the kind of person I want to be. Someone who doesn’t unravel over small things. Someone who doesn’t snap over things that don’t matter. Someone who can stay composed when life doesn’t behave. Who doesn’t pass a bad mood down the line—grocery store to stranger, stranger to friend, friend to feed.

Because that’s how it happens, isn’t it? You leave the house in a fog of irritation, and that fog spills into every room you enter. You’re short with the girl at checkout. Maybe she’s short with the next person. And on it goes. Or—same timeline, different tone—you offer a warm smile instead and maybe it shifts her day. Maybe it doesn’t. But you stayed regulated, you stayed soft.

We forget how much power lives in those micro-moments—how easily our reactions become someone else’s emotional weather. I don’t want to be someone who lowers the temperature of the room just because my day didn’t start perfectly. I want to be the person who can hold her own weather. Who doesn’t need the world to behave in order to stay grounded. Who can pause, breathe, and choose a different timeline. And that starts with the decision not to lose myself over something as silly as spilled coffee. Or more accurately: with the decision to remember what matters, even when something spills.

There’s a version of calm that looks like apathy—the kind of calm that’s actually just emotional shutdown. It’s not grace; it’s withdrawal. That’s not what I’m after. I don’t want to become unreachable. I want to become steady.

There’s a difference between choosing your response and pretending you don’t feel anything at all. One is restraint. The other is disconnection. And for a long time, I confused the two. When I first started trying to “regulate,” I thought not reacting meant I was doing well—but really, I was just bottling everything up in a more socially acceptable way. I wasn’t losing my temper, but I also wasn’t being honest. There’s nothing admirable about appearing composed if you’re just suppressing every emotion until it leaks out sideways.

Now I think about composure differently. Not as repression, but as discernment. Not as being unaffected, but as being unprovoked. It’s the quiet clarity that allows you to decide what’s actually worth your energy. What deserves your breath. What doesn’t.

Because the world is full of bait. And most of it is stupid. The wrong tone in a text. A stranger’s bad mood. A passive aggressive comment online. A train delay. A slow-loading page. A look. A tone. A glitch. An interruption. All these tiny things, engineered or accidental, that hook our attention and ask us to make them mean something. And you can. You can decide that every one of them is personal. You can give them access to your nervous system and let them drive the rest of your day. Or—you can learn to stay in your body, recognize what’s yours to carry, and release the rest without performance or apology.

That’s what I’m practicing now. Not stoicism, not silence, not performative “good vibes only” energy. Just the ability to stay intact when things don’t go my way. To stay emotionally honest without being emotionally hijacked. To stay soft, even when everything around me is trying to make me go berserk.

We live in a culture that rewards reactivity. Every platform, every headline, every push notification is designed to provoke something out of you—outrage, urgency, fear, envy, click. And we take the bait constantly. Not because we’re weak, but because it’s everywhere. Being annoyed, offended, overstimulated, exhausted—it’s become the default emotional setting for most people. And it’s contagious.

But I’ve started to realize just how expensive those reactions are. Not just energetically, but relationally. Every time I take the bait—snap at someone, fire off a passive-aggressive message, spiral into a narrative about how the world is out to get me—I’m not just draining my own peace. I’m feeding something bigger. I’m participating in a feedback loop that teaches everyone around me that this is normal. That we’re all just supposed to be slightly on edge, all the time.

So I’ve been asking myself a different set of questions lately. Not, “Is this worth being upset over?”—because honestly, that answer is often yes. But: “Is this worth acting upset over? Is this where I want to spend my attention? Do I want to hand over my state of mind to this moment?”

Most of the time, the answer is no. And not in a dissociative, “toxic positivity” way. In a grounded, self-respecting way. Because there’s a kind of strength in deciding that not everything deserves a reaction. That just because someone’s throwing fire doesn’t mean I need to catch it. That I can feel something deeply and still choose not to pass it along.

It’s not about becoming passive. It’s about becoming precise. About knowing when your energy actually matters—and when your silence is the more powerful offering. That small decision, over and over again, creates a very different life. One where you’re not constantly cleaning up the mess of your own emotional residue. One where you leave people better than you found them. One where your presence doesn’t ripple out as noise, but as calm.

Because the truth is, we all leave trails. Every moment we react or don’t. Every room we walk into, every interaction we touch—we’re either regulating the collective nervous system or we’re adding to the noise. And I want to be someone who knows the difference.

There was a time in my life when strength looked like sharpness. Like quick comebacks and cutting people off. Like never crying in front of anyone, never showing softness, never letting things touch me too deeply. It looked like control, or at least the performance of it. Like being someone who “doesn’t take shit”—but mostly because I hadn’t yet learned how to metabolize anything that hurt without immediately swinging back.

But I don’t want to be like that anymore. That kind of strength is brittle. It’s always bracing for impact, always on the edge of cracking. It might keep people at arm’s length, but it also keeps you from ever fully feeling safe in your own body.

Now, strength feels like something quieter. Not a wall, but a center. Not distance, but groundedness. It’s the ability to stay open without leaking all over the place. To stay soft without folding. To stay kind without being walked on.

It’s taken years to unlearn the reflex that says you have to defend your dignity by being cold. Or that softness equals weakness. Or that if you don’t assert yourself at every turn, people will forget your worth. I’ve found the opposite to be true: the more I trust my own steadiness, the less I feel the need to prove anything to anyone. Grace makes space. Security doesn’t shout.

This doesn’t mean I don’t still get triggered, or frustrated, or overwhelmed. It just means I don’t treat those emotions as instructions anymore. I can feel them rise, acknowledge them, and still choose how I respond. That, to me, is strength. Not the absence of emotion, but the ability to hold it without being consumed.

That’s the kind of person I want to grow into. Someone who knows what matters enough not to get pulled into every current. Someone who can hold her line, hold her peace, and—when it makes sense—hold someone else through theirs.

Softness doesn’t come naturally to me. I had to learn it—over time, through mistakes, through overstimulation, through burnout. I had to learn it in moments when I snapped at someone and instantly regretted it, or let one minor inconvenience hijack my whole day. I had to learn it after realizing how many of my moods weren’t actually mine, just residue from the internet, from other people, from a body that hadn’t been grounded in weeks.

So now, I have rituals. Not routines, not checklists—rituals. Quiet practices that remind me I have a body, a breath, a choice. I walk every day—two or three miles, sometimes with music, sometimes without. I move slowly in the mornings, play with my dogs while my coffee brews, let myself think before the world starts talking at me. I lift weights a few times a week—not to hit a number, but to stay strong inside my own skin. I read: poetry, physics, whatever is calling to me. I take long baths with no agenda. No phone. No podcast. Just heat, silence, and space to untangle whatever’s gotten knotted up inside me.

None of it is particularly impressive. It won’t go viral. It doesn’t scale. But it returns me to myself. It gives me a place to hear my own thoughts before they’re interrupted by everyone else’s. And most importantly, it helps me stay available—to joy, to discomfort, to people I care about—without collapsing into overstimulation or numbness.

Because softness isn’t passive. It’s not default. It’s not something you wake up with. It’s something you cultivate. It’s the result of moving through the day with just enough intention to remember who you are, and just enough presence to not let the world rewrite it for you.

This kind of steadiness doesn’t make life easier. It just makes it clearer. And clarity is one of the most generous things you can offer—to yourself, and to the people who rely on you to be solid when the ground starts shaking.

The kind of person I want to be isn’t chasing perfection. She’s just paying attention. To how she moves through the world. To what she leaves behind. To what she chooses to carry and what she lets pass through.

I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t spiral over things that don’t matter. Who doesn’t unload her mood on a stranger. Who doesn’t take every interruption as a personal attack or every inconvenience as proof that life is out to get her. I want to stay soft even when things don’t go my way. Especially then.

Because the truth is, most of life is just a series of small things. A spilled coffee. A delayed train. A weird tone in a text. A project that didn’t land. A dog who wants your attention more than you want to give it. These aren’t crises. They’re invitations. And how we respond to them builds who we are. It’s cumulative. Your nervous system, your relationships, your quality of life—it all adds up.

There will always be something trying to pull you out of yourself. To make you hard. To make you snap. To make you spill whatever unresolved thing you’re carrying onto whoever’s closest. I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to carry that forward. I want to pause. I want to breathe. I want to choose a better timeline.

Not a perfect one. Just one where I don’t have to keep repairing damage I caused in a moment of reactivity. One where I can stay grounded even when the day is messy. One where the people around me feel more regulated after being near me, not less.

That’s the kind of person I want to be. Not for the optics. Not for the story. But because it feels better to move through life with a little grace in your pocket. Because it makes other people feel safer. Because it makes you feel safer, too.

And because even when everything else is chaos, I want to be someone who can still find the center—and hold it.