Easy-going?

The other day a friend, whom I greatly admire, said to me “you get worked up too much about things”. This got me thinking.

I’ve always prided myself on being easy-going; easy going people don’t get worked up unnecessarily, right? It seems that while I am myself easy going in many ways, I get impatient when others are equally easy going.

One of my pet hates is when people don’t do what they say they will do. In fact, I often take it personally when someone says they will do something for me and then don’t (usually through no fault of their own). It shits me to the point of distraction. Is this the action of an easy-going person? When this kind of thing happens I sit there fuming silently to myself and get, as my friend said, totally worked up. The person in question invariably apologises and explains that they had ran out of phone credit, had been working non-stop, had been ill or any number of other totally understandable reasons. Boy do I feel like the fucking arsehole afterwards.

What about my own (in)actions? My health being as “fluctuatory” as it is, I have been known to miss appointments and commitments. Does that make me a hypocrite? Could it be that the people who annoy me so are simply as equally easy-going as I? My mother constantly gets upset with me when I stay with Lala and Cal because I genuinely forget, or am unable, to call her as promised for whatever reason (some more “legitimate” than others). When I stay with them I always leave my departure date open-ended for as long as possible to avoid nasty situations of “you said you’d be coming home on Monday and now you’re telling me you want to stay till Wednesday”. Even with this open-ended system, I still upset her somehow because she usually assumes the standard holiday period will be one or two weeks. When I decide to stay for three or four she feels I am going back on my unspoken word.

Does this prevent me from getting worked up when I am in my mother’s position? Nope.

Does my friend’s pointing this out to me mean I will try to be more easy-going all the time, and not just when it suits me? Yep.