about you.
That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. After a recent plane trip, I was standing at the baggage carousel. I’d been waiting a rather long time for my luggage. In fact, no one had gotten any suitcases at all. A rumor started that our bags were lost. This is, of course, very stressful, but I figured getting all worked up would make it only more stressful. But one of the women who’d been on my flight did not agree. She started pacing and trying to recruit an army to storm the airport administration: “Let’s all go together to the office and scream that we’re not going to take it anymore!”
I turned to a passenger standing next to me who seemed tempted to follow and told her, “Don’t even think about it. Take the high road.”
Sure enough, a short time later our bags showed up and no one had to handcuff herself to the ticket counter. There are times for protest, for civil disobedience, but on a day-to-day basis, it’s best to avoid bringing out the big guns.
And yet, I know for a fact how hard it can be to keep your frustration to yourself. Sometimes keeping in feelings can be painful. One time, for me, it proved almost fatal. I was in my twenties and was having an excruciatingly horrible lunch with my mother, during which I honestly saw my life pass before my eyes.
Fortunately, I arrived at the restaurant, Clyde’s of Georgetown, first, because waiting just fuels my mother’s innate sense of martyrdom (unfortunately, this trait is genetic). Also, if she gets there first, my mother will often hand the hostess her credit card as she walks in to avoid a discussion at the end of the meal about who will pay the bill.
“You just love taking the battle out of this thing, don’t you?” I ask when I learn she’s done this. (Twice, I’ve actually gone to the hostess and substituted my credit card for hers, but then it turns into a real fight.)
When she arrived, I greeted her with a hug and a kiss, which was like hugging and kissing a mannequin, because she was as stiff as an ironing board. I love my mother dearly. I’ll miss her when she’s gone. She is filled with emotion and cries during commercials, but she’s never been very affectionate with her children. She doesn’t kiss me. I hug her, but she doesn’t hug back. I don’t doubt how much she loves me, but she’s kind of like a rock. Make that an elegant rock: Nancy Gunn has always been the spitting image of Queen Elizabeth II.
I always wonder if her lack of demonstrable affection is connected to an incident from her youth. My grandmother liked to tell the story of coming home to find the goldfish were dead. When asked what happened, my mother answered, “I don’t know. I just took them out of the bowl to kiss them.”
Was it then she learned that a kiss can kill?
In any case, we were shown to a table. I think we both ordered a glass of wine (and if we didn’t, we should have), and I chose the restaurant’s famous hamburger.
When the food arrived, Mother was carrying on about something about me that was annoying and irritating to her. It could have been anything from not calling her in a month to “I told you that I hate that tie, so why do you persist in wearing it?”
I nodded, eating, attempting to take the high road and pretending to agree with her, but unfortunately, I was internalizing my frustration. Suddenly, I inhaled a too-large bite of burger. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t eject it from my lungs. I literally thought I was going to die. I started to gesture wildly.
My mother thought I was simply behaving badly, so she carried on talking and looking at me disapprovingly. Thanks to the ringing in my ears as I started to suffocate, her voice grew silent, as did the ambient voices and clatter in the large room. Panic set in. I was going to die—right there, upright in a chair, with my elegant mother carrying on and on throughout the speedy evolution of my death.
For some unknown reason, my panic abated, and resignation set in. It was at that moment that my constricted throat muscles relaxed and the potentially fatal chunk of chuck catapulted from my mouth—and landed in my mother’s lap.
She was horrified and said so. “What the hell is the matter with you?” she hissed. “If you’re angry at me, just tell me so. You don’t have to spit your food onto me!”
“Spit my food onto you? I almost died! Right here! In front of you! I thought I was going to die, and you’re embarrassed?” I yelled back. “Wouldn’t you have been more embarrassed by a corpse?”
By now I was in tears, and Mother looked contrite. She responded, “Don’t be ridiculous; you didn’t die. You’re here.”
I asked for the check.
Mother said, “I’ll take it.”
“No, I will,” I retorted. “Because if I had died, then you would have
We never did resolve whatever conflict we’d been having, but at least my near-death experience changed the subject. And I learned a couple of valuable lessons. One: When you’re on death’s door, rules of etiquette should most definitely be suspended. And two: Never try to resolve an emotional conflict over food. I recommend ordering drinks instead—with neither ice nor olives.
In the absence of choking hazards, taking the high road is a good strategy. You never know where the people you’re dealing with today are going to be in twenty years—or next month! Even if you’re a really selfish person and are only looking out for your own self-interest, you should treat people well. Why bitch-slap someone unless you’re leaving the planet for good? Don’t burn bridges; you might need those bridges later.
But there are limits. You don’t let yourself be abused. Even as you take the high road in a perilous situation, you should try to figure out how to keep from being in a difficult position like that again.
For years, my refrain was: I bend and I bend and I bend until I snap. No matter what was dished out I would think:
Now I’ve learned to set limits and to take cues from people’s behavior.
For example, if someone is always late to meetings with you, you need to ask yourself why you continue to let yourself make appointments with this person. If you hate doing something for someone, you need to ask yourself why you keep doing it.
I used to host a wonderful fashion scholarship dinner. I did it for five years in a row. But the last time I did, it was horribly managed. Every decision made around the event was terrible, and the people organizing it were completely dismissive of every concern I had. I just hated the whole thing.
So I said to myself, “Why am I doing this?” I thought,
I gave the organization a lot of notice and felt very liberated.
But I wasn’t free yet. The group’s president took me to lunch, and he was horribly abusive, telling me how angry he was that I’d stopped doing the event and piling on other complaints about me for good measure! Then he followed up with threatening e-mails. He was just furious that I wasn’t going to host his event anymore and figured he would try to intimidate me into reconsidering my resignation.
I thought,
When someone else from the organization contacted me, I explained how badly I felt I’d been treated. He must have said something to my tormentor, because then I received this syrupy e-mail from the yelling president about how much I mean to the event. He asked me if we could get together again.
I thought about it for a second and then said, “No.”
This was an abusive relationship.
You don’t want to behave badly back at people like that, though God knows it’s tempting. But you also don’t want to put up with mistreatment. It does no one any favors.
The abuser could be your boss, and in a case like that you just need to try to keep your integrity, even as you’re being mistreated, and try to get out of the situation as soon as you possibly can. Now that I’ve been on television, though, it’s like the whole world is my boss. Everyone has an opinion they want to share about my
