It really scares me how easy it is to get in trouble

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Growing up, your parents and other trusted adults would always tell you: "Be nice to others. Treat others the way you want to be treated. And if you know you've messed up, take responsibility"

But once you transition into adulthood, you learn the hard way it's not actually that simple. Matter of fact, you realize just how frighteningly easy it is to get in trouble, which you weren't even trying to to start with. As a kid, you'd thought getting in trouble was based on the wrongdoings you do for yourself. Turned out, it's actually based more on the wrongdoing which OTHERS perceive as. You know it's a misunderstanding, but they never give you a chance to explain. And even if you did get the chance, they'll just accuse you of making excuses. And to further clarify my intended context, even a simple difference in behavior or tone or anything about you is enough to piss others off.

Nowadays it seems, getting in trouble or facing consequences is more under THEIR power than yours. We should be accepting responsibility knowing we messed up, not because some idiot misconstrued some behavior of ours as some form of perceived offense.

It's still good to be nice to others...even if it sometimes backfires on you.

I sense that you're overthinking this thing a little bit.

I kinda understand it where one may say something one intends to mean what one has been thinking about but others hear or read what was said in other ways and end up offended by it. And yet it is not what you thought you said.

It feels like no matter what you say, what you say is wrong according to others, and if one does not say anything, one gets told off for not speaking...

I am fortunate because my Mum thinks like me so she knows the type of thoughts I have. She knows I don't intend to say things like others think they hear them.

I have a neighbour who speaks using the hint system and I only get a few hints so communication can lead to frustrations on both sides. No ones fault. Is just the way I and the neighbour have learned to communicate are on different wavelengths somehow. Usually we are ok.

I make it a point to be nice to others, every day. I want people to see me as an Om Nom, a Sweet Pea.

I would suggest letting people in your life know that you have difficulty with picking up on subtle hints and hence that you need people to communicate assertively with you, and that you would prefer that people ask you questions rather than jump to conclusions about you.

However, if you are going to do this, then you also need to make it safe for people to be assertive with you, which means you need to be able to respond gracefully to constructive criticism. See the list of articles I posted in another WP thread here about responding gracefully to criticism.


If you are lucky enough to find people willing to communicate with you about the things you do that bother them for whatever reason, then you need to be willing to listen to them and try to understand why they are bothered by these things, rather than just dismiss their concerns on the grounds of it being "just a misunderstanding." You might find these tutorials on active listening helpful.