"But they were rude"

Sometimes the remark really was sharp. The email wasn't just short, it was curt. The tone at dinner wasn't just quiet, it had an edge. You're not imagining that. So it was about you.

I'd separate two things that the reading runs together. Rude, and about you. A person can be rude to you without it being about you, and in fact that's how most rudeness works. The colleague who snaps in the corridor snaps at the next person too. The partner with an edge at dinner would have had the same edge with anyone at that table. The rudeness is real. Its cause is the day behind it, and you happened to be the person standing in front of them when the day came out.

That's not a comfortable thought, because it means you were treated badly for no reason connected to you, and there's a part of the mind that would rather have caused it, because a cause is something you can fix. If the edge was about the bins, you can sort the bins. If it was about a meeting at eleven that you weren't in, there's nothing to do but wait for it to pass. The reading prefers the first because the first gives you something to do.

But the second is usually true, and it comes with something the first doesn't. If the edge is their weather and not your fault, you don't have to absorb it. You can notice it, name it to yourself as their day, and decline to spend the evening on it. Rudeness that isn't about you is something that happened near you, like weather, and weather doesn't require you to work out what you did.

There's a limit here, and I'll say it. If someone is rude to you regularly, and only to you, and it's got a pattern, then chapter 14 is about how to tell, and chapter 24 is about what to do when the check confirms it. Rudeness that's aimed is a real thing and this book doesn't deny it. But the single sharp email, the one edged evening, is almost always the day behind it, and treating it as about you gives it a power over your evening that it didn't earn.