Waiting Inside Us

            “She irritates me so badly.”

            “He drives me crazy.”

            I don’t know how many times I’ve thought or said these things. If just the OTHER person would change. If only she wouldn’t make those comments, or he wouldn’t be such a jerk-face. Then life would be better.

            So while I’m thinking about how bad moods are everyone else's fault, I come to a stoplight. And I got annoyed. The thing refused to turn green. How dare it? I needed to go somewhere. I was irritated. I was put into a bad mood by an impersonal piece of technology, or so I thought.

            But was I really going to blame my bad mood on a stoplight? Seriously? A hunk of metal?

            That’s when it hit me.

Looking Inside

            The simple fact of the matter is that nothing outside makes you irritated. Or annoyed. Or grumpy*. External factors (people, stoplights, etc) trigger you to unleash what’s already inside of you.

            All you needed was an excuse to let yourself go.

            So we blame others because they make us irritated. We blame a late flight for making us annoyed. We blame a lack of sleep or food for making us grumpy.

            No, those things just make us susceptible to the not-so-good part of ourselves. The simple fact of the matter is that we can control whether we snap at someone out of irritation. We can control whether to wear a frown all day out of annoyance. We can control our dark thoughts and brooding moods.

            Nothing outside of yourself makes you annoyed, or grumpy, or irritated. No, all of that is inside of you, just waiting for an excuse to come out. Will you let it?

            So never say people put you in a bad mood. You put yourself in a bad mood, and they just helped to trigger it. But they didn’t create the bad mood for you. That came from inside.

*Sadness and anger are different. They can be legitimately triggered by external factors that you can't control.