one of my biggest fears in life is that i will hurt someone and that their life will be severely negatively impacted as a result. it has contributed to my being so avoidant of confrontation, but also of actually forming bonds with others. an example is when i lived in a rough party of the city and a middle-aged black man would sit outside playing rap music really loudly until around 3am on a pretty regular basis. i was sleeping maybe 3-4 hours a night during this period, but only one person (a foreign woman, maybe south american) ever confronted him about it. i told myself that i was being overly sensitive or something, but it really pissed me off. anyway one night around 1 am on a weekday i went out and asked him to turn his music down and he stared at me as if he didn't understand me or thought i was beneath his concern, a kind of mildly contemptuous look. i was exhausted and really annoyed so i ended up shouting at him to turn his fucking music down and when i did that he got up angrily and his son came rushing out to intervene and basically told his dad to go inside and told me the music would be turned down. i went back to my flat angry and soon enough he was back outside for another hour playing his music and occasionally shouting something explicit about me. anyway when he eventually went to bed i couldn't sleep because i was paranoid that i had really hurt him by speaking the way i did and getting angry. i even considered setting my alarm earlier so i could buy a card from the shop and write an apology on it and put it through his door. i'm not really sure what caused me to be like this, but i appreciate now how damaging it was to be like this for my own self-esteem.
United Kingdom