Don’t Tell me to ‘Calm Down’

Have you ever been made to feel like you are being unreasonable based on your emotional reactions?

Have you ever felt angry or showed stubbornness, only to be brushed off to the side, instead of respected for your determination to stand strong?

Have you ever been told to ‘calm down’?

The first time that I stood up for myself when I was told to ‘calm down’ was when I was a university student and was dating a boy, where we later learned we were not meant for each other. There was a snowstorm outside, and the year before that I had gotten into a pretty nasty car accident, so the weather made me nervous when it came to driving.

I had a late class and he was supposed to meet me at my apartment. I was going to drive him to his parents for the weekend, while I went to visit mine. The semester was coming to a close, and it was finally time to relax and rejuvenate a little before the winter semester commenced. Driving to my apartment from campus, which was usually a two-minute drive uphill, took almost twenty minutes. My vision was obstructed by the blizzard, and traffic was moving so slowly that my car kept getting stuck every time I went to give it some gas. My heart was throbbing, my armpits drenched in sweat and once I pulled into my parking lot, I made the decision not to move.

When I told him that I could not drive an additional two hours in this weather, that it made me nervous and it would be safer for us to leave in the morning when the blizzard dyed down and the streets were cleaned off, he freaked. He started yelling at me how he was looking forward to seeing his family, how it had been so long, that they were going to be disappointed and that he was relying on me. I looked at him in shock and I said things like ‘you don’t have your license, you have never been in an accident due to the weather, I have’ ‘I am not risking my life, we can leave in the morning when the roads are better’ ‘you can deal with this decision, call your mother and let her know you won’t be there until morning’. And to that, all I got was a ‘calm down’, with an additional eye-roll of annoyance.

If any of you have just gotten out of a situation where your adrenaline was running higher than usual, you will know that it doesn’t take much to make you fly off your wagon. I snapped. For the first time, I stood up to a ‘calm down’.

“It has nothing to do with how calm I am, and everything to do with safety. I am not being baby because I don’t want to drive in a blizzard, I am being logical and I am being an adult.”

Needless to say, he slept on the couch that night and we ended things a few months later. But I learned such a valuable lesson that day. That there are going to be people that refuse to learn or look at a situation from your shoes, and instead of understanding the power of your feelings, they will simply tell you to ‘calm down’.

These are not the people you need in your life.

There are so many individuals who are passionate, who are passionate about writing, passionate about subjects, passionate about feelings and emotions, and their whole entire lives they have been told to ‘calm down’. Why is that?

The words ‘calm down’ only make things worse, it will change a person’s attitude completely. When they are excited about something and want to share their excitement, ‘calm down’ can just put them in a hole, never wanting to come out again to show their true personality.

If someone is putting their foot down, showing anger towards another individual, and standing up for themselves, ‘calm down’ just shows that you didn’t take the opportunity to understand, and are not listening.

So… no, don’t tell me to calm down. Don’t tell your siblings, aunts, uncles, parents, friends or people on the internet to ‘calm down’. Take the opportunity to listen, learn and to understand. If it is becoming too much, change your ‘calm down’ to an ‘I understand’, there is so much more value in that vocabulary change and more respect.

And if you don’t agree, take the opportunity to have an educational discussion, because as soon as you say ‘calm down’, their ears have turned off. Sometimes these discussions work, sometimes they don’t, but when they don’t it is because there is a lack of effort on the other side, but you showed effort in trying to make a difference.

We can’t be afraid of emotions. We can’t be afraid of anger, sadness, disappointment and annoyance. If we spend our whole lives afraid of them and are shutting them down with the words ‘calm down’, there will be no progress on either end. Adults have real conversations. People have real conversations and human-beings need real conversations.