Anyone else tend to react defensively to phrases that were intended to be innocent, but come across as demeaning to you?
This morning I was out at my Cousins family's Lake house, helping put a dock in the water. After standing around for a while, holding bolts and handing my brother and 2 male cousins wrenches, I finally offered to start carrying the wooden top peices down from the house. My cousin looks at me skeptically for a second, and finally comments that they are pretty heavy and awkward, and "I don't know if you can handle it".
Immediately I get defensive and insist that I can do it, and storm off to prove him wrong. Turns out that he was right, and they are pretty heavy and awkward, and my other cousin struggled to carry them just as much as I did. I almost immediately regretted trying to move them on my own, and realized I was likely to hurt myself in the process, but I did it, and the look of surprise on my cousins face when he saw me coming down the stairs with it was totally worth it.