Don’t Feed It
It's Just Bait For Attention
The comment landed the way they always do.
Not loud. Not obvious enough to call out in the moment. Just a quiet dismissal. That won’t work. Followed by silence, followed by the conversation moving on as if I hadn’t said anything at all.
I sat with it. Offered something else. Same response. Too difficult to execute. We kept going. I kept offering. They kept declining. No alternatives. No explanation. Just the wall of someone who had decided, before I’d opened my mouth, that whatever came out of it wouldn’t be worth much.
I kept thinking alongside this person, genuinely trying to solve the problem we’d been given. Then I offered something I knew would work, and explained how I had tested it. The temperature in the room changed, and they conceded to including it. The tone said everything the words didn’t.
Later, I brought it up directly. I told them I felt my contributions were being dismissed. Their response was to call me disrespectful. Then unprofessional. Then they informed me, with full confidence, that they were far more knowledgeable on the subject than I was.
I snapped back. Just a little. Then I bit my tongue.
Not because I was wrong. Because I suddenly understood what I was actually looking at.
This person wasn’t responding to my ideas. They were responding to what my ideas meant about them. Every contribution I made was landing as an accusation: that someone with less experience could offer something valuable, which in their internal arithmetic meant they were inadequate. The dismissals weren’t about the work. They were a defense system running on threat perception.
I saw the trap. Clearly.
And for a moment I had already stepped into it.
The letters I wrote afterward stayed in my notes. They explained exactly where they had misunderstood me, laid out the full case for why I was right. I showed them to friends. Told them my side, waited for them to confirm what I already believed. They did. Of course they did. They only had my version.
I wasn’t processing. I was rehearsing.
Hours. Actual hours.
There’s a belief most people carry without knowing it: that if someone challenges your value, you owe them a defense. That silence is surrender. That the honorable thing is to step into the arena and set the record straight.
It assumes the challenger is operating in good faith. That they want the truth. That the argument, if won cleanly, will actually change something.
It almost never does.
What actually happens when you step into the arena is that you validate the premise: that your worth is a question requiring an answer. You hand them the pen. The story becomes about the confrontation now, not the work. And they get exactly what they were reaching for: your energy, your time, your attention pulled fully into their frame.
The bureaucracy forced us forward. We had to keep working. They wanted to skip the conflict entirely, pretend it hadn’t happened. So I reduced contact to whatever was directly necessary. When they said something abrasive I let it land without catching it. Just let it sit there.
Like a donut, it got us down the road. The flat was still flat.
That realization doesn’t make it clean. It just makes it theirs.
The pause is the thing.
Not a strategy. Not a technique you apply. A moment of genuine stillness in which you see clearly what’s being offered and decide whether you want it.
They say something sharp. The heat arrives in your chest. The response forms before you’ve thought it.
Wait. Three seconds. Neutral face. Let the silence do what silence does.
What happens next is interesting. The words they said hang in the air without your energy to animate them. The discomfort that was supposed to transfer to you stays exactly where it originated. You didn’t catch it. It sits there, between you, unclaimed.
You didn’t win the argument. You didn’t lose it either. You simply declined to have it.
Rewrite the script quietly while you wait. This is about their insecurity, not my value. Not as a comfort. As an accurate reading of the room. They aren’t responding to you. They’re responding to what you represent in their internal economy. You can see that clearly from outside the reaction.
Then look for the third option. Not fight. Not retreat. The thing neither of those are. Agree to disagree and mean it. Walk away and keep walking. Refuse to pick up what was put down for you.
The energy you protect this way isn’t abstract. It’s the same energy that goes into the work, into the thinking, into the next problem that actually deserves your full attention. A person who can drain it without effort is a tax you didn’t agree to pay.
Stop paying it.
~ Seido