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I'll start off by saying, never underestimate the powers of communication, self-awareness, and empathy. These are the key to resolving any conflict. I'm no saint, but I do TRY at least to operate with these in mind, if not in practice.

Once upon a time, roughly 2 years ago, I was at a school for physical theatre. This place was FILLED with conflicts. I mean, you get a bunch of crazy assertive theatre people, leaders, who try to come together and collaborate as equals to create pieces of theatre as a response to esoteric guidelines, and you're BOUND to stir up some... drama. Needless to say, this hot-headed blogger was bound to get into it with SOMEone. And I did. We'll call her Minnie, for anonymity's sake.

Minnie was a bit of a control freak. I'm sure she'd agree to that description if put in kinder terms. But she was very adamant from day one about setting up guidelines for how we communicate and how we take breaks and only one person speaks at a time. It sounds good on paper, but in a group of fiery talented ADULTS, I would say let's not fix it till it's broken. We hadn't even said much to each other at this point, let alone worked together. Before we could even attempt this, she was taking control of how we would talk. I know some would argue against me on this, but you had to be there: it felt more like she wanted to assert her dominance than to help the group. Like if we didn't do it her way, she'd lose it.

We agreed to her terms, and ended up finding that not everyone could be satisfied by them. Inevitably, someone's ideas got trampled, or someone disagreed with this consensus or whatever. We got through it, while Minnie kept trying to assert her dominance. Even at one point getting called out by one of the people in our group calling her out on dictating what we were doing and it needed to stop. Minnie had a mini-melt down and started taking a back seat after that...

Fast forward a few weeks to our mask unit. We were in the same group again, more intimate this time. We found ourselves butting heads on a lot of creative issues, to the point that I fully hated her. Everything about her made me cringe. One day, by chance, we both were walking alone towards campus and she waved me over. Great. So we started talking. In that talk, we both expressed our frustrations: I felt like I wasn't being heard in the group while other even MORE assertive people (if you can only imagine) were dominating the rehearsal and she and I BOTH couldn't get a word in edge-wise. She felt the same. We found some common ground. We talked it out. There was lots of self-reflection there. "I feel" statements were going around like crazy, followed by examples of situations. In about 5-10 minutes on that walk, we healed every shred of negative energy between us. Just by talking it out. COMMUNICATION, people. COMMUNICATION is all it takes. We ended up respecting each other so much by the end of our time together, we even became roommates for a little while before parting ways (circumstantial... we were living with my then-boyfriend who turned out to be a cheating douchebag so I could not have left that situation more quickly than I did.)

I had no idea that she was feeling the same way I did. I didn't even think about the situation from her perspective. She was also dealing with a lot of personal stuff that no one even knew about. Our time at that school was stressful... for EVERYone... so it's no wonder she was going through a lot, too. If I had only known her situation, and if only she had known mine, maybe we could have been friends sooner. Or maybe we needed that tension to create some good theatre, and form a stronger friendship. Who knows? What I do know is, I'm reminded all the time of that situation when I have those feelings stirring up, and I swap out my frustration for empathy. I mean, to an extent. I'm no saint! But I try to think about what that person is expecting and where they are coming from. It's helped me keep the peace a LOT. I'll continue to work on that.