Why Does It Irritate Me When Someone Does Something I Used to Do?

When recognizing an old pattern makes us think we know what happens next

Personal growth comes with receipts.

You spend years learning about yourself, changing behaviors, making different choices.

Then somebody does something that irritates you and life quietly slides an old receipt across the counter.

Ma’am. You have purchased this item before.

Well, shit.

Years ago, I loved babies so much that I once kept someone’s baby longer than they wanted me to.

I crossed a boundary.

Years later, I saw behavior that reminded me of my own and immediately thought:

I know where this goes.

And that certainty felt pretty convincing.

I had lived it.

I knew firsthand that someone can have loving intentions and still step over somebody else’s boundary.

But then I caught the leap my brain had made.

I had seen something familiar.

That didn’t automatically mean I was watching the same pattern, for the same reason, heading toward the same ending.

We do this all the time.

Someone overexplains and we think, I know why they’re doing that.

Someone rescues everybody around them and we think, Yep. I know where THAT road goes.

Someone analyzes the period after “Okay.” like it came back from the crime lab and we think:

How do they not see this?

Which gets especially funny when there was a time we didn’t see it either.

Experience can make us wiser.

It can also make us very confident.

Recognition is information. It isn’t the whole story.

Sometimes somebody really is crossing a boundary.

Sometimes your experience helps you recognize trouble sooner because you’ve already stepped in that particular pile of dog shit.

That matters.

But experience still doesn’t give us psychic powers.

I may recognize one piece without knowing the person’s motive, history, or what they’ll do next.

Sometimes I’m not only looking at the person in front of me.

I’m looking at them through the memory of someone I used to be.

So instead of jumping from:

I recognize this

to

I know exactly what this means

I’ve started asking:

What is happening now, and what might my own history be adding to it?

That lets me use what life has taught me without turning my past into somebody else’s prophecy.

And then I still have to decide what I’m going to do.

I can respond to the boundary that actually exists instead of the next five boundaries my imagination predicts.

I can speak when something needs to be said.

And I can let another person show me who they are instead of making them audition against somebody from my past.

Because sometimes when my brain says:

Trust me. I’ve seen this movie.

What I’ve really seen is a movie with a similar opening scene.

The rest is still unwritten.

Experience can make us wiser.

It just doesn’t make us prophets.