All that said, you don't have to grow a tougher skin, you just have to figure out what is About You and what is Not. That's the boundary that matters. What your mother does or says about a beggar is not about you. Even when she wants you to buy into her justifications and validate her, it's still not about you. You can't change it, you can't fix it, because it's not yours.

I think this is true. Thank you.

I have to think more about what you said about the correct way of responding to somebody--I still think it's just really weird to claim that you're not a nice person explicitly in order to avoid somebody's pitch for money *and then* spend a ten minute car trip claiming that you are a nice person in order to avoid feeling guilty about avoiding the pitch. It's not even the avoiding so much as the justification that bothers me.

It's been harder for me to ignore stuff like this since I've come home, I am basically living here on my parent's sufferance. Incidents like this leave me with a feeling they'd actually be really mean to me when I needed help if I wasn't their daughter, or unless I ask for help in the 'right' way (which has in fact been the case in the past when I've asked for help), and I don't know what to do about that.