A friend called me last night. She’s in the midst of some very messy office politics at work. She thinks her coworkers are being difficult. They think she’s being unreasonable. Her boss thinks they’re all wrong and they all think the boss is wrong. “Do you think I’m being unreasonable? Am I crazy or are they?” she asked. And I paused, because I’ve seen a whole lot of crazy at this point in my life and I’ve gotten a pretty secure grip on two things: the first is what I think is and isn’t crazy, and the second (and more important) is that it totally doesn’t matter.

She wanted to know the answer to the first part, and if I left out that second part, it was easy enough for me to answer: no, I didn’t think she was being unreasonable or crazy in her interactions with her colleagues. I thought she had some pretty healthy boundaries and was sticking to them. But I didn’t want to tell her that, because what I think doesn’t matter.

I know because I’ve been in that place before: tallying up the yes and no votes in my favor. Sure, I could tell her she wasn’t crazy. But her coworkers friends were busy telling them they weren’t crazy either. So, she’d go in to work the next day and say, “My friend Mary says I’m not being unreasonable,” and her coworker would say, “Yeah, well, my friend Tom says you are.” And then she’d have to ask someone else in order to continue having the balance fall in her favor.

To really feel better, I’ve found that I have to be ok with where I am, regardless of how the score stands. So, what I really wanted to tell her, more than that she was being reasonable in this particular situation, was that it was reasonable for her to have her own boundaries, regardless of whether or not I (or anyone else) agreed with any given boundary at any given moment. But I found myself unable to articulate that part. Sure, it seems easy now that I have time and a keyboard, but it’s a different story when I’m fumbling for words on the phone. And it seemed so hard at the time to put what I wanted to say into a nice neat little sentence, rather than launching into a really long philosophical treatise. So, what I actually said was the ultimately unhelpful external validation thing, “No, you’re not crazy.”

Then I thought, “But it doesn’t matter what I think! Oh, wait. There’s a program slogan, ‘What other people think of me is none of my business.’ That’s what I want to say!” That’s never been one of my favorite slogans, but it did state the crux of the issue in a nice simple little sentence. Oh. I guess that’s why we have slogans in 12 Step. They’re pithy and easy to remember.

I’ve had my share of frustration with slogans. They can feel canned. They can be tiresome. But some of them inspire me. Some I repeat daily. And some, even the ones that aren’t my favorites, can come in handy sometimes.