Maybe there’s a silver lining after having to deal with shitty people: you can truly appreciate the good ones. –Brandi Glanville

   

Since I was a little kid, and perhaps because of my relatively unique upbringing, I have always been one of those individuals incessantly searching for the good in people. To be fair, in some people, it isn’t always there for me or anyone else to find. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking.

I do this so relentlessly that I frustrate myself to the point of actually getting my feelings hurt because it’s hard for me to understand why some people behave differently than I do. And you don’t have to point out the hypocritical nature of that statement because I get it: I’m a social worker and I have long since realized that everyone is different. In fact, I’ve taken classes on just about every nationality, religious affiliation and sexual orientation and can tell you why stereotypes shouldn’t exist. I got an A in Cultural Competencies, friends. And I actually loved it; learning about other cultures is absolutely fascinating. 

I know that I should have realized a long time ago that people think differently than I do. I understand that I should already know that while I’m always worried about how my daily choices will affect other people, some of those other people absolutely do not worry about their own choices. Some of those other people, in fact, couldn’t take two seconds to be concerned because their worldview is that only of themselves. Everybody else, well, who gives a shit, right? As long as they’re feeling satisfactory and their lives are going as they planned, they just couldn’t be bothered.

 Well let me tell you something, friends. I am absolutely not one of those people. And that blatant disregard for other people, that ultra-common tendency to be indifferent to the things going on around you just doesn’t make sense to me.

I know this probably sounds crazy, like one of my average “people are just terrible” rants. I know that I shouldn’t put too much stock in others; I know that I should just make sure that I’m being courteous within my own life and let other individuals worry about themselves. I know all of this, believe me. I should have realized it when I got rear-ended when I was twenty and the idiot just left me there. I should have realized it when a friend of mine from high school abandoned both of her children with their respective fathers and chose not to pick them up for two weeks. I should have realized it when my car was sitting parked in my driveway and a girl who was barely in her twenties rammed into the back of it because she was coked out of her mind. I should have realized it when I first started my job and one of the mothers hit her child across the cheek with a flip flop so hard that it broke the skin.

I get it. Some people are not like me. They don’t care about other people unless it benefits or directly affects them. And while I understand that not all cases are awful, not everyone is out there beating their children, I’m grouping them into the same category because any blatant disregard for another person is unacceptable. No matter how much we try to minimize it. Sure, maybe you’re a slightly better person if you cheat on your girlfriend repeatedly like it’s your goddamn job versus if you habitually abuse her. But the lack of regard and respect for her is still there regardless. You still aren’t treating her like a person; you still aren’t treating her the way you would prefer to be treated.

I mean, if you’re a Christian, either way you’re going to hell, right? The level of sin is equivalent.

Sorry if it was my swerve that tempted you to sway. –Jewel, Sometimes It Be that Way

I feel like a lot of my time is spent justifying why people behave in the manner they do. I find that in doing so, it helps to alleviate some of the stress I feel in regards to how shitty they act. Sometimes in the morning, on my way to work, I will run through things that have happened. I go through various scenarios, trying to figure out exactly why certain things were said, perhaps exactly why a series of my text messages were ignored, or whether or not I should be concerned about any of it. Maybe they aren’t easily offended when I unintentionally speak the truth because I feel like they deserve it. Maybe they’re getting their toes done and can’t stagger their gaze from SnapChat to their message center. Maybe they had some sort of catastrophic event occur that has overtaken their attention and they can’t focus on anything else. Maybe they’re not really ignoring me but instead are having a series of brain scans to ensure they don’t have some sort of life threatening disease. Or maybe, they really just don’t give a fuck. And if that’s the case (which I believe it oftentimes is), I am worrying for absolutely no reason because now clearly, I am the only one who cares.

For example, I have a friend who has been in this sort of unhealthy relationship for a few years. Her boyfriend has been cheating on her basically as long as I’ve known her and the sad part is that all her friends and the surrounding community are privy to it. If you confront her on it and tell her that quite frankly, she could do a lot better, she claims that he loves her. She says that they’ve been together too long to just walk away from all of it and that there’s certainly more good than bad. There are times, she says, when all we see is the bad shit; we’re never there to experience the [limited] good things he does. (And THAT particular problem is a whole other blog in itself.) Sometimes, she will maintain, it is more about matters of the heart than anything else. She feels the way she does about him and he allegedly reciprocates and she will defend that’s all that should matter.

I very strongly disagree.

But I can’t lay claim to what is right and what isn’t. I’m not going to sit here and say that I am the all-knowing when it comes to relationships and how to treat people because I absolutely am not. To be honest, I’m learning all of this as I go. And to be even more honest, I feel like sometimes I make decisions based too much on what I want to do rather than what is actually right. For example, most nights I would rather drink vodka and sit at my computer when what I should do is go work out and make a healthy dinner. It’s all about balance, friends. Listen, I’m digressing.

But what I do know is that isn’t behavior indicative of someone who loves another person. That isn’t the type of manner that a man behaves when he is allegedly so dedicated to someone, when he claims he wants to spend forever with them, when he alleges that the only future he sees is with her. Leaving your girlfriend’s bed to go shack up with some Amazon hooker is not the route you want to take if you’re trying to work on your relationship. But maybe that’s just me. Like I said, my upbringing was a little different than you would expect. I’m no one to judge.

For every rat you see, there’s fifty you don’t. –Dr. Phil McGraw

My point is the carelessness. I don’t understand how literally going out of your way to hurt people, to leave them out of decisions, and label them unimportant could ever be considered enjoyable. Personally, I just ain’t about that life. I was raised half hippie, half Italian and I just feel like in my family, certain things were deemed unacceptable. I could never cuss at my mom, I could never raise my voice at her in front of my dad, I could never kill insects without some logical reason, and I couldn’t say something snarky about someone without then responding with three nice things about them to compensate. There were just rules in the Visceglie home.

I mean, literally this morning, I was taking a walk with one of my co-workers and another one of the advocates was driving by. I could see that someone was waving at me but I didn’t recognize the vehicle and I couldn’t really see her face through the morning sunlight. When I realized that it was another domestic violence advocate, someone that I work with every day, I felt so guilty for having squinted to make out her face instead of waving at her. 

The first thing I did when I got back into the office was track her down and apologize. I told her that I hadn’t realized it was her, that I would never intentionally ignore her. “You’re so thoughtful, Kathleen,” she chuckled at me, “to be so considerate of my feelings.” But the way she said it was like she hadn’t expected me to be so sensitive to her feelings. As if it was the norm to just treat people like garbage. And that, friends, that is exactly what infuriates me.

The fact that all of this miserable treatment has just become so commonplace is incredibly frustrating. I know so many people who put up with some of the most unreal things because it has just become acceptable. I’m not sure if it’s really even about love anymore in some of these romantic situations. I think it’s just gone so far past the point of, “Well, I love him so I will go ahead and just put it up with it.”

Getting treated like garbage is just something that has become normal in our world. People kill each other and steal from each other, they tailgate each other on busy roads and refuse to go 15 miles per hour in an elementary school zone, and they scream at their co-workers in a public place while they treat other employees like their favorites. All of this has just become so normal that being nice, going out of your way for someone, and taking the time to really care and comfort someone during their strife just doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just so much easier to give up on your partner and get divorced, to roll up your window when you pull up next to a homeless person, to tell your girlfriend she isn’t any fun when she whines that you’re never home because you’re cheating on her, and to stop talking to people who are going through a genuinely hard time. I mean, caring just seems to take so much unnecessary effort.

Who has the time to give some guidance? Who has the time to go donate blood to help those in need? Who has the time to just roll down their window, pull their $110 Marc Jacobs sunglasses off their face and smile at a homeless man? Who has the time to just goddamn listen when people are stressing, when they’re struggling, when they can’t really come to terms with their feelings but just need someone to talk to?

#Ain’tNobodyGotTimeforThat   

Nostalgia means pain from an old wound. –Don Draper, Mad Men

You want to hear a sad story? When my grandmother was a little girl, her mother abandoned them. I’m a little fuzzy on the details because she very rarely spoke about it but she had like three or four siblings that were under the age of five years old. And her mother, the woman who chose to have these multiple children, the woman who was supposed to have given her life to raise them to be good people, well, she just couldn’t be bothered. I remember my grandmother telling me that her father was a bit cold to all the children (and my dad told me a bunch of times that he was always afraid of him) but she loved him more than anyone else in the world because he had stepped up and taken care of all those children. He moved them to New York City (and we’re talking about the 1920’s when things were a lot more difficult for impoverished families than they are now) and worked a million hours a week and did whatever he had to do to make sure they were healthy and safe.

Eventually she met my grandfather; they got married, had a bunch of kids of their own and stayed in the City until they eventually moved out to Long Island. You know, that woman never contacted my grandmother. Not even once. Not after she got married, not after she had her first child (my dad), and even worse, not when she and her siblings were young children! I mean, to just abandon your family, those babies that you carried for nine months in your belly, there is just no excuse for that. I don’t even care. Those children didn’t ask to be born. They most certainly didn’t deserve to be abandoned.

It was something that my grandmother carried with her for a lot of years. It was something that she had always struggled with but had never really been vocal about because she was just a reserved individual. She had the tendency to keep things like that to herself. (It was one of the things I really admired about her because no matter what life spat at her, she had a baby on her hip, a gorgeous dress on with satin heels, and was in the process of whipping up an intricate Italian meal for forty people stuffed into a railroad apartment. She had just learned early on to do what she had to do, whether she wanted to or not, and whatever meal she made had to taste good or she had forty crazy Italians to answer to. She didn’t just give up when things got difficult. And I have to say, that is something that she taught all four of her children.)

Anyway, I remember one day, and I swear to God, I will never forget this is as long as I live; she opened up to me about her mother. Honestly, she didn’t share a lot of personal things like that with me because she was “Gramma”; her role was to keep the order and ensure that I was full and fed, staying out of trouble, and good at playing Parcheesi. But at this point in my life, I was much older and I think she saw a lot of herself in me. She teared up a little bit and told me that her mother had contacted her once when my dad was a young child (I want to say around 5) but she was still too angry to do anything about it. She said that she couldn’t see past her blind anger to let her into her life at that point. It had been so many years; she didn’t really see the point in forgiving her when she had already missed out on so much.

“I will never forgive myself,” she told me and looked hard at me with the same eyes we shared. “I couldn’t just let it go; I was too angry at her. But now I wish I had.”

To be honest, I don’t think that that was something that she had shared with many people because realistically, she was a mom and a grandma. Her feelings just naturally took the backseat because she was always so busy taking care of everyone else. (Real talk: when I was in COLLEGE she made an Italian dish for me to take for a presentation because I was single and didn’t really know how to cook. I kept trying to get up and help her and she said, “Sit down, baby. Just relax. Gramma will make you some nice sauce after this.” To this day, every time I hear a thick New York accent it warms my heart.)

Moral of the Crazy: I realized the other day that I just spend so much time worrying how what I’ve said to someone might affect them, how perhaps my random lack of attention could have upset them, how perhaps the way they’re treating me is how I’ve taught them to treat me. For whatever reason, my overwhelming niceness gets mistaken for weakness and that makes me an easy target for getting taken advantage of. I was thinking that maybe I’ve conditioned people to just be lousy sometimes because I’ve always taken on that maternal role as well; I like to care for people and pick them up when things fall apart. One of my closest, dearest friends said to me a few days ago, “I think you like to fix people and it gets you hurt sometimes.” She couldn’t have been more right.

One example of this is when certain friends come to my house and I tend to wait on them hand and foot. And don’t misunderstand because I will be honest with you, I love to do that. I love taking care of people by babying them with good food and my Amy Winehouse Pandora station. When people come to visit my house most especially, I don’t expect them to lift a finger. I don’t care if they’ve been to my house one hundred and eleven times, I like to get them drinks (or at least ask if they need a refill), I like to make their plate and serve them while they’re seated, I like to bake and bake and bake and I don’t even like sweets! I just want everyone to be fat and happy. I’m an Italian after all; it’s what we do.

But naturally, with all this, sometimes people go a little crazy and they forget that they have legs that work. Suddenly I’m doing everything for everyone and while that’s totally okay because it’s my house, a simple thank you can go a long way. Something that is a little more hurtful and actually happened to me recently was when I said to a friend, “I’m a nurturer; I just love taking care of people.” I sort of figured that because this woman had been to my house about a thousand times, she would get what I was referring to and either agree or just let it go by. But she didn’t. Instead she said, “Um… since when?”

Since when?! As if I hadn’t just literally waited on her and her garbage boyfriend about a jillion times? GTFO.

As with the aforementioned story, which is a sensitive one, I can’t help but feel like maybe my grandmother had every right to be stone stubborn about her mother. Of course I have to tread lightly because although we would never meet, we were blood relatives. But I just feel like when people hurt you like that, when they just abandon you when you really need them, when they don’t stand beside you to hold you up, I mean, they’re not your people. Those aren’t traits of people who care about you. Those aren’t the kinds of things that people do when they have your best intentions in mind. People who run out on you when you need them the most, when you’ve gone through a serious transition like divorce, moving, or quitting a job, how much could those people really consider you? Honestly? And with that being said, are those people really good people? I’m always so busy trying to find the good in every person but in situations like these, is there any?

Listen friends, I’m going to be real with you: I think that sometimes, with some people, there just isn’t any. And that really pains me because for people like me, who are sensitive and do care about certain things like other people’s feelings, it can be detrimental to the day. When I see or hear of things, bad things, which happen to people who probably don’t deserve it; it makes me sick to my stomach. It stops my heart.

I would just like for all of you, right now, to think about your day tomorrow. Maybe you’ve got to go to work, or you’ve got to take your sweet child to school, or maybe you just don’t have any plans at all other than laying around on the couch watching reruns of Archer. (I don’t know. That’s what I do on my day off. What do normal people watch on television?) Whatever it is, I want you to think about all the people you can bless just by being yourself.

I want you to go on with your day with the intention of making someone else’s better, even if it’s just for a moment. If you’re home sitting on your couch watching reruns of Bob’s Burgers (dude, I don’t know…), I want you to scroll through your phone and find someone you haven’t talked to in a while. Pull yourself away from the CandyCrush Saga and think about who you’ve missed out on catching up with over the last few months or who might be going through something rough. I want you to hit them up and say, “Hey, I know it’s been a long time but I wanted to tell you that I’m thinking about you; I hope you’re doing well.”

Sometimes, that’s all it takes. It’s not a marriage proposal; it’s not the chance to delve into a crazy, awkward conversation with someone you haven’t talked to in seven years. It’s a simple thought, a nice gesture, something that can ultimately go a long way for someone else.

And next time you see that homeless man panhandling on the street, give him a nice smile. Your life is great and you should be so thankful. The least you could do is be pleasant to him from behind your car window.

After all, the best things in life are free. 

Don’t ever forget that a small group of thoughtful people can change the world; it’s the only thing that ever has. –Aaron Sorkin