~by Haley Lynn Gray~
Somewhere along the way my life got hectic — four children, a job, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, responsibility for my parents, and an MBA in progress. One side effect of a full life is that people say remarkable things to you about it.
I’m never quite sure how to respond, so I generally say “thank you” and leave it there. But some of them deserve a second look, because they reveal more about the speaker than the subject.
The ones about my body
Since losing a significant amount of weight, I’ve become — apparently — more energetic.
This is a favourite. People tell me how much energy I seem to have now, and how much better I must feel. Both delivered warmly, and both carrying a quiet assumption: that the person I was before was tired, unwell, and presumably miserable.
I was running businesses, raising four children and finishing an MBA at Duke. Whatever I was, I was not short of energy.
There’s a version of this that arrives as a compliment and lands as a review of who you used to be. “You must feel so much better” invites you to agree that you were previously doing badly. Along with it came assumptions about my competence — people finding me, in no particular order, more articulate, more capable and more worth listening to than they had before.
Same qualifications. Same businesses. Same opinions.
The ones about the workload
“I don’t know how you do it all.” Usually kind, occasionally not.
“You must be so organised” — said to someone who is, at that moment, holding it together with scheduling and paid help.
And the classic: some variation of “doesn’t your family mind?”, which nobody has ever, in the history of the world, asked a father.
Why I mostly just say thank you
Because correcting every one of these would be a full-time job, and because most people mean well. The remark that irritates you was usually assembled carelessly rather than cruelly.
But there’s a cost to the careless version, and it’s worth naming: these comments tell people what assumptions are being made about them. Which ones apply to their appearance rather than their work. Which parts of their life are apparently public property.
What to say instead
If you want to be encouraging without any of this:
Comment on what someone did, not how they look. “That presentation was excellent” never goes wrong. “You look so well” frequently does.
Don’t praise a change in a way that criticises the before. The person you’re congratulating was there the whole time.
Ask rather than conclude. “How’s it all going?” beats any guess about how it must feel.
And if someone’s plate is genuinely full — offer something specific. “Can I take the school run on Thursday?” is worth a hundred observations about how much they have on.
And if you’re on the receiving end
“Thank you” is a complete sentence. You are not obliged to correct anyone, agree with the implied assessment of your former self, or explain your arrangements.
Some things really are best left unsaid — and some are best left unanswered.
