- Dear Coke Talk: On projection.

Dear Coke Talk: On projection.

A colleague of mine is a thin eastern european woman with very beautiful features and long dark hair. She knows she’s beautiful and works it. A few weeks before a big work event, she asked me what I was wearing to it, and told me she didn’t have an outfit yet. Thinking nothing of it I described my dress to her, and told her its colour which was somewhat unusual.

The night of the event, I had an emergency and had to leave town so I couldn’t actually attend. I just saw some photos from the event, and noticed that she wore a dress in the exact color that I told her I was wearing.

My workplace is competitive in many ways, but I have never been surrounded by people who would bring the competition to the level of “wearing the colour better”. You live in LA, so your radar must be up on this kind of thing. Could this have been an intentional act on her part?

Did the hottie at work intentionally look better than you? Hmm. I dunno. Did you intentionally insult me with that backhanded remark about living in LA?

Listen up, darling. This whole cliché of a question is nothing more than a textbook example of Freudian projection. Let me break it down for you:

You’re a bitch with a lot of passive aggressive tendencies. Instead of dealing with those tendencies consciously, you unconsciously project them onto other people and subsequently begin thinking that they are the ones who are actually passive aggressive bitches.

The impulse to “wear the color better” belongs entirely to you. By ascribing it to your attractive foreign colleague — quite predictably, I might add — you get to walk away with a clean conscience despite it being your negative impulse.

Don’t feel bad. We all do this. The trick is recognizing it for what it is. Catching yourself projecting onto other people is entry-level self-realization. Own that shit and learn from it. It’s the very essence of embracing your inner bitch.