For a long time, traffic was where my worst thinking showed up. A hesitation from another driver felt personal. Someone drifting across lanes felt deliberate. My mind filled in intention faster than reality could keep up. In those stories, everyone else was careless on purpose, and I was the only one paying attention.

One day, in a shopping mall garage, that pattern made itself impossible to ignore.

I had priority at a turn and a woman forced her way in front of my car. Letting her go was easier, so I did. A minute later she cut in again from the opposite direction, accelerating just enough to stay ahead. Then came the crawl through the next level. She drove straight down the middle of two lanes, checking every row, blocking anyone behind her from turning or passing. There was nowhere to go and no way around her.

I felt it immediately. Tight chest, heat in the face, a flood of thoughts about respect, fairness, awareness. Every insult that felt justified arrived on time.

Eventually a gap opened. I parked and walked toward the entrance.

There she was again. Calm. Unbothered. Moving at her own pace. Not angry, not smug, not even aware there had been a conflict. Everything that had escalated inside me had existed only there. She wasn't thinking about me. She wasn't making a point. She wasn't even aware of the story I'd been living inside for the last five minutes.

She moved on untouched. I carried the weight.

Here's the mechanism I couldn't see while I was in it. My mind assigned intention before it had evidence. She cut in, and within a second I had a full character profile. Selfish. Entitled. Deliberately inconsiderate. That profile wasn't based on anything she communicated. It was based on what my body felt and the story my brain built to explain the feeling. The anger arrived first. The villain was constructed after, to justify the anger that was already there.

That's what makes traffic rage, and a hundred other daily frustrations, feel so righteous. The emotion shows up before the interpretation, but the interpretation lands so fast it feels like the cause. You think you're angry because she cut you off. You're actually angry first, and your mind found her to pin it on.

Most of what I felt in that garage had nothing to do with her. It was old frustration using a new target. The tightness in my chest wasn't proportional to being delayed by two minutes in a parking garage. That intensity came from somewhere else. She was just the closest surface available.

Years earlier someone had told me that anger like this is self-punishment for someone else's mistake. I dismissed it at the time. It sounded too clean. Standing there in the garage watching her walk away without a thought about me, it stopped being optional to believe otherwise.

I still get annoyed. That hasn't disappeared. What changed is noticing when the punishment has already begun. The tightening, the heat, the story gaining momentum before there's anything real to respond to.

The move is one question, asked in the first few seconds of the reaction: "Is this about what just happened, or is this about something I brought with me?" I don't always catch it in time. But when I do, the answer is almost never "this is about the car in front of me." It's almost always older than that. And naming that, even roughly, takes enough pressure out of the moment that the story stops building.

It doesn't make the annoyance vanish. It just stops me from spending ten minutes punishing myself for someone else's driving.