u/CryFeeling7695

I know people say “protect your energy” and I agree with that, but I think sometimes we use spiritual language to avoid having compassion for what is actually happening. When someone walks into a room angry, jealous, bitter, controlling, needy, judgmental or just heavy to be around, it is easy to say they have bad energy and leave it there. Sometimes that is useful because you don’t need to psychoanalyze everyone who drains you. But at the same time, I wonder how much of what we call bad energy is just pain that never got processed and now leaks out through the personality.

A person who gossips all the time might be someone who only feels connected through shared judgment. A person who constantly competes might be terrified of being invisible. A person who makes everything negative might be trying to feel prepared for disappointment before it arrives. A person who cannot celebrate you might be sitting inside a life where they secretly feel like they failed. Again, this doesn’t mean you have to keep them close, but it changes the way I see it.

This is where frequency becomes interesting to me because people talk about low frequency like it is a personality type, but maybe it is more like a wound state. Maybe someone’s nervous system got stuck in defense and now their whole presence is shaped by that defense. They don’t even know they are doing it. They just think that is who they are.

The scary part is that we all do this in some way. We all spread something from what we have not healed. Some people spread anxiety, some spread shame, some spread superiority, some spread neediness, some spread coldness and call it independence. So maybe the question is not only “Who is ruining my energy?” but also “What energy do people have to recover from after being around me?” That question is uncomfortable, but I think it is probably one of the most honest spiritual questions a person can ask.

This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I think I started reading for the wrong reasons. I was at a point where I felt like everyone around me was shallow. People wanted to talk about gossip, parties, money, celebrities, politics, random drama, and I kept thinking there has to be more to life than this. At first reading made my ego worse because I started feeling like I was different, like I saw something other people didn’t see, and that can become dangerous because you begin confusing awareness with superiority.

Then after reading more, especially old books, spiritual texts, psychology and biographies, it started doing the opposite. Instead of making me feel above people, it made me understand people more. I started seeing how much of a person is not really chosen in the way we pretend it is. Their fears, their reactions, their need for attention, their avoidance, their anger, their obsession with status, their inability to sit alone, a lot of it comes from somewhere. It doesn’t excuse everything, but it explains more than I wanted to admit.

That changed my life because I was becoming bitter and calling it intelligence. I thought I hated society because I was awake, but really I was disappointed and lonely and I didn’t know how to process that without judging everyone. Books gave me more language for human pain. They made me realize that a person can be annoying and still be carrying something heavy, that someone can look confident and still be terrified inside, that shallow conversations are sometimes just people trying to stay away from the deeper thing they don’t know how to touch.

I still don’t want to waste my life in meaningless conversations, but I don’t feel the same anger anymore. I think reading made me softer, and that was not what I expected. I expected it to make me sharper, smarter, more impressive, but the real change was that I became less reactive and less cruel in my mind. That probably helped my life more than any “success” book could have.