Cancer
Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
The small irritation you keep turning over in your mind is no longer about what someone said or did not say in that moment. It has become about all the other moments when you felt the same particular kind of overlooked, and now you are keeping track of a pattern that the other person does not even know exists. What you bring back from every interaction is not just what happened there, but what it reminds you of, what it adds to, what it confirms about how you move through the world. The weight is not in the original slight but in the collection you have been building around it.