One day at Calder’s summer school, another special needs student started calling him mean names. It hurt him. Like anyone would be, Calder was upset. I expected him to be angry or to spend the rest of the day laying in bed due to what had happened. Instead, he shrugged it off and went about his day.
Whether Calder was right or not (he probably was anyways) wasn’t what stuck with me. What stuck with me was that he didn’t let the other boy’s words become his own. He didn’t allow the insults to crush him. He didn’t spend the day trying to get even. He recognized that the comments probably came from a place of insecurity and moved on.
It’s easy to become petty when someone is petty toward us. We want to match their energy, prove them wrong, or make sure they feel as bad as they made us feel. But pettiness has a way of trapping both people in the same cycle. Nobody wins. Nobody grows. It only turns one bad moment into many.
Calder unknowingly showed me that the best response isn’t always retaliation. Sometimes the greatest victory is refusing to carry someone else’s bitterness with you. You don’t have to answer every insult. You don’t have to turn every disagreement into a competition.
Pettiness achieves nothing. It doesn’t solve problems, heal hurt feelings, or make us happier. More often than not, it only gives negativity a longer life.
Sometimes the most mature thing we can do is what Calder did that day: understand, let go, and keep being ourselves.
Autism | Calderism 
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